


Inner-Ear

by VanishingPoint



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Foggy bromance, M/M, Marvel Universe, Porn With Plot, X-Men References
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-03-25 15:40:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3815884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanishingPoint/pseuds/VanishingPoint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>God never gives you more than you can handle.<br/>That's what Dad used to say, anyway.</p><p>After being kidnapped out of his own office, Matthew Murdock realizes that he's attracted the ire of Hell's Kitchen's drug-running underbelly. Soon, Matt finds both sides of himself - the lawyer and the vigilante - working with a mysterious ex-yakuza to bring down the entire operation and maybe, just maybe, save himself and the people he loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Just blind

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slow-burn romance piece that I've decided to throw at an actual plot. We'll see how that goes.

_God never gives you more than you can handle._

That’s what dad used to say, anyway.

 _He’s good that way_ , Dad would murmur, back before Matt’s accident, and then with increased regularity afterward. He’d repeat it like he was trying to convince himself, or maybe sweet-talk a little sympathy out of the saints.

 _He’ll pile on a lot—we_ are _Murdoch’s, after all—but he’ll never pile on too much,_ he’d say. _Even if you’re at the bottom of the hole, or backed so deep into the corner that all you can see’s your opponent’s fists, he’ll give you something._ Here, dad would gesture with his beer, a smile on his bruised face. _Just a little glimpse of the sky._

So when Matt dreams a soft, gentle dream—soft lips on his forehead, sunlight on his closed eyelids, blades of grass pricking against his bare back (he doesn’t think he’s _ever_ just slept outside like that; the world’s too loud)—well… he knows things are bad even before he’s fully even fully conscious. He never has good dreams. They only come when he’s at his lowest. After all, God can’t really send him the sky, not anymore.

The sun is hot on his eyelids, but there’s no red glow, not the way that he knows the sun’s supposed to look, vaguely remembers from twenty years ago. Even in his dreams he’s blind.

He wakes slowly. The dream clings to him even as he slips out of it, the aroma of crushed leaves and traffic and a snowcone stand down the street lingering in his nostrils. They’re replaced by the sharp, iron tang of blood.

With an almost tangible _snap_ , the dream breaks away from him.

He doesn’t open his eyes, not yet.

Everything hurts.

That’s the first thing he notices—the throbbing beat of his heart in his temples, his stomach, his chest, his fingertips. It almost feels like being hungover, but no, not quite. Something’s wrong.

 _Drugged,_ he concludes, sluggishly. He can feel the tiny, bee-sting pinprick of the injection site in his shoulder.

He remembers… somewhat. He remembers leaving Nelson and Murdock, turning the key in the lock, feeling for the smooth, cold doorknob, relying more on his fingertips than usual. His ears were occupied, both sides filled with his rubber ear-buds, the robotic voice of his text-to-speech app droning out a file on international drug law.

He’d been trying to find a loophole for a case he and Foggy were working on. Specifically, trying to find a way to link the local drug trade with the yakuza who had—apparently—filled the power vacuum left by the bust of the triad heroin rings.

He’d been listening hard. Sometimes his fingers get tired of the braille, and it’s easier to just take the slower pace of the text-to-speech.

He’d been distracted. How could he have even _considered_ walking deaf through the city?

Stupid.

The room he’s in is small. He can feel a general sense of its dimensions with every breath, eddies of the warmed air from his lungs swirling into the air around him and then returning, picked up by the sweat-slicked skin of his face, his neck, the palms of his hands where they’re cuffed behind his back. The room is square, maybe three-by-three meters, less than a few paces in either direction.

He’s lying on his side. The floor is rough concrete, cold through his clothing, icy against his bare cheek.

He pulls in a breath and focuses.

His heartbeat isn’t the only one in the room.

On the other side of the small space, in the opposite corner, somebody else is sitting on the floor. Matt gets a general sense of someone curled up, knees pulled close, feet—bare, no scuff of rubber soles, only the whisper-soft slide of skin on the floor—folded one on top of the other.

He doesn’t recognize the breathing or the heartbeat. It isn’t somebody he knows well.

With that realization, he’s so relieved that he almost laughs, almost says something. This other person isn’t Foggy, or Karen, or Claire, or any of his clients, and that’s the best news he could hope for. They haven’t gotten caught up in his mistake this time.

Or… no.

He isn’t in his costume. He’s still wearing his blazer, button-down shirt, wool slacks. He’s still dressed for his day at the office. Whoever’s after him might not be after Daredevil. All they’ve got is Matthew Murdock.

Maybe he doesn’t understand the situation completely.

Matt sucks his tongue up against his teeth, and then, hoping that it sounds like a random mouth-sound that someone might make in their sleep, opens his lips, sucking in air with his tongue.

The resulting _click_ sound echoes through the room, and he instantly feels a little more in control as the added clarity and information bounces back to his eardrums. It’s the really sharp, percussive sounds that give him clear images, and now he can make out everything, down to the tiny whorls of detail in the wood of the single door.

He focuses on the other person, but living things are different. They move, they breathe, they radiate heat and are constantly thrumming with tiny motions, and as a result, Matt doesn’t get a clear picture. Not without touching, at least. Focusing on a person’s face is like staring at a jumping flame, or trying to make out the details of a coin at the bottom of a pool, feet of water warping and shadowing the final image.

It’s like that. He tried to explain that to Claire, and she’d just laughed.

Foggy was different. _Why the hell did you ask to touch my face, then?_ He’d snarled, making aborted movements like he wanted to hit Matt. Matt knew he wouldn’t.

 _I can’t see your face, Foggy,_ Matt had said, exhausted. _I just know you’ve got one._

 _Yeah?_ He’d been combative. Hurt. Matt could understand, even if Foggy’s anger hurt more than the stab wound in his side. _Then what’s my face look like right now?_

 _Angry?_ Matt had guessed. He knew Foggy didn’t want to hear the truth—that his face looked white-hot, hazier than usual because his mouth kept trembling, eyes blinking furiously.

 _Yeah? Glad to know you can see_ that _just fine._

 _Only because you’re yelling,_ Matt had murmured, fighting back frustrated tears of his own and eventually losing the battle.

The man in this room, though, is a little more still, enough for Matt to get a shifting, vague impression of a sharp jaw, flat cheeks, narrow eyes, a soft, rounded nose that gives the otherwise-manly appearance a gentler, boyish touch.

He’s watching Matt, or at least has his head turned in Matt’s direction—it almost always impossible to tell where eyes are pointing—and his heart is racing, _thrumming_ like a distant car engine, absolutely terrified even as he struggles to hide it beneath slow, meditative breaths.

This man immediately strikes Matt as the stoic sort, and his build certainly lends itself to that impression. He’s broad-shouldered, and when he breathes, Matt can feel the dense vibration of lean muscle pulling over bone. He’s shorter than Matt, but probably just as strong.

Most people wouldn’t be able to tell how terrified this man is, but Matt can. The heart always gives it away.

After a long, stifling silence, the man shifts. He leans forward, closer to Matt as if straining to look at him.

“ _Ne_ ,” the man says. His voice is tentative. There’s an air of desperation. “ _Ne. Anata ga me o samashite imasu ka?_ ”

Japanese. Perfect. Matt’s Castilian Spanish is going to be _really_ helpful.

Still, Matt listens hard and takes what he can get from the man’s voice—he sounds young, mid-twenties, probably. There’s a hint of tightness in his throat that could point to exhaustion maybe, or pain.

Matt considers just keeping quiet, pretending to be asleep a bit longer, see if maybe the headache will fade, but he finally sighs and grunts, “What?” His voice is grittier than he expects. It hardly sounds like a proper word.

“ _Ah_ ,” the other man says. There’s another long silence. “You awake?” he asks, and then adds, by way of explanation, “It’s dark.”

Matt had assumed as much. No buzz of electricity, none of that faint—ever so faint—warmth that emanates from an incandescent bulb. “I’m awake.” He can hear the other man shift uncomfortably. He assumes the man’s injured. “Are you alright?”

“Yes. I’m fine.” That heartbeat stutters in a lie.

The man’s accent is thick, but understandable. He speaks with a sureness that suggests fluency.

There’s a soft _clink-scrape_ of metal as the man straightens. His wrists are cuffed, just like Matt’s, but his are in front. Lucky him. Matt’s shoulders are screaming at him from the strained position.

Matt focuses a little more, trying to point in on where that tinge of blood is coming from, but there’s something wrong with his senses. It feels like the room tilts subtly around him.

“Are you?” the man asks. He’s still gazing wide-eyed into the darkness, unblinking--Matt can’t hear the minute brush of eyelids and eyelashes against each other—as if maybe by opening his eyes wide enough, he’ll see a hint of light that he hasn’t yet caught. Matt knows what that feels like.

There’s an uncertainty to the way the man is sitting, like he hasn’t decided whether it’s alright for him to come any closer. “I couldn’t hear you breathing, for a while,” the man says, voice low, wordlessly pleading for Matt to keep talking to him, to not leave him in the silence and the dark. “I thought you might be dead.”

Matt nods, not that the other man can see it. “I’m okay. Drugged, I think. Still feeling dizzy.”

“Ah,” the man says again, this time with relief. “That’s good.”

Matt lets his handcuffs clatter against the concrete, trying to get a better image of the room. The ceiling is patched paint, peeling in places. The door is thick wood. Beyond that, he can smell salt water mixed with rotting pine and the cutting aroma of factory run-off, similar to the stench of the north-side docks. “Where are we?”

The rustle of a shrug. “New York?”

Matt hums in response. He’s pretty sure they’re on the north side docks. And that can only mean one thing, really. Yakuza.

And if that’s the case, he certainly can’t stay here.

He rolls onto his stomach, ignoring the resulting wave of nausea, and pulls his knees up underneath him, using his forehead and one shoulder to lever himself upright. He sways for a moment on his knees, trying to gather his senses and only somewhat succeeding.

The other man turns his head, cocking it, listening intently to Matt’s movements, pulling his knees closer to his chest protectively.

Matt feels a twinge of pity. It’s always odd, having the tables turned, being with a sighted person in the dark. Being the _less_ blind person in the room.

“Why are you here?” The man asks, and then, slightly alarmed, “What are you doing?” 

"I don’t know.” Matt sure as hell knows where his worst conclusions jump, but he has to hope that isn’t the case. These people don’t know who he is. They didn’t take him in costume. They might not know him as the Devil. No, they can’t know who he is, or else they’d have taken more precautions to keep him contained. All that’s holding him back is a pair of flimsy handcuffs. "And I'm just standing up," he adds, for the other man's benefit.

He twists his hands in the cuffs. He might be strong enough to break them, if he’s willing to hurt himself in the process, but the quick fix might not be the best fix in this case. If these people don’t know what he is… he shouldn’t give them any reason to suspect. For now, he just has to be a normal person, a normal _blind man_ , and hope for a way out of this that doesn’t include breaking things and punching people.

But why take him at all, then? He’s just some small-time lawyer, and a blind man, at that. Could this really just be because he’s been digging into their books? Are they so afraid of legal involvement? Or perhaps they think he’s so small-fry that they can just disappear him without ramifications.

He hopes that isn’t the case. Either way, he doesn’t want to think about that. “What about you?”

“I don’t know,” the man says, but his heart betrays him in another lie.

“No?” Matt doesn’t have time for this. He isn’t just going to sit around and wait for his captors to show up. With a grunt of effort, he gets one of his feet beneath him and pushes upward, staggering to a stand.

For a moment, he almost feels fine, but then an awful, bone-deep nausea wracks him, twists in his inner ears and makes the floor tilt dangerously beneath him. He teeters forward on his toes and then, unable to recover, balance completely shot, drops back to his knees, _hard_. When his torso follows suit, it’s all he can do to twist and avoid breaking his own nose against the concrete.

“You okay?”

Matt groans. He tries to answer, but then has to clamp his mouth shut to keep from vomiting.

“Hey…” The other man’s voice is shot through with concern, getting closer, grunting with exertion.

He isn’t walking to Matt’s side. Rather, he’s crawling, using only his cuffed arms in front of him and one leg, the other lifted slightly off the ground, like a dog with an injured paw. “ _Hey._ Don’t—” The man’s trying to be quiet, but the panic’s back in his voice, and he forces himself back to a hissing whisper. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

On top of everything, his hearing’s gone funny again. God, he has no idea what they’ve given him. He hopes fervently that the effects will wear off soon.

It’s a surprise when the other man appears suddenly at his side. The man hunches, one hand outstretched awkwardly toward Matt’s body, feeling blindly, brushing a thigh, a hip, an elbow, before clumsy fingers settle on one of Matt’s wrists. Their handcuffs—Matt’s at his back, the other’s cuffed in front—clink together.

Matt brushes him off firmly—but, he hopes, not unkindly—and, rasping through a dry throat, says, “I’m fine. Really.”

The man sits back again. He makes a flat, placating “uh-huh” sound in the back of his throat. He’s closer now, kneeling, and as Matt tries to sit up once more, the man hovers, cuffed hands resting lightly beneath Matt’s arm, ready to catch him.

Matt almost pushes the other man away again. It’s a habit, from all of the dozens—hundreds, _thousands_ , it seems—of times that people, strangers and acquaintances alike, have grabbed him without warning to “help him” through a doorway, or up a flight of stairs, or across the street. Thank God Foggy never did that. Maybe that was why Matt liked him so much, right from the beginning. Foggy understood immediately that Matt isn’t some fragile child that needs to be handled with cotton gloves. He got that Matt likes his personal space.

Generally all that the well-wishers do is upset his fragile senses with their unexpected contact. He doesn’t generally need the help, after all.

Except now he does need the help.

“Thanks,” Matt mutters, while the other man steadies him, firm hands on his upper arm, strong and still. “What’s your name?”

There’s a frown in the other man’s voice as he says, “Kimi.”

“Kimi?” he repeats. Why is it that the muscular, fighting men always seem to have such unimposing names?

“Uh, yeah.” Discomfort now. Awkwardness. “It’s a nickname. My real name is quite long. My boss says it’s a ‘mouthful.’”

Matt focuses on the little flare of surprise and humor that stirs in his chest, letting it drown out the uncomfortable feeling of _adrift_ -ness that has him leaning into the other man’s hold, feeling like the floor is bucking beneath him even while—intellectually, he knows—it lies as still as it usually does.

“Who’s your boss?” Matt asks. Not Japanese, presumably, if he can’t pronounce Kimi’s name properly.

“Doesn’t matter.” Matt dismisses the question as the moment drags. He’s on his knees now, and he rolls his shoulders, tilting toward the wall a meter to his left. “Could you--?”

Wordlessly, Kimi helps him shuffle over to sit, propped against the wall. The disorientation is marginally better now that he has something sturdy to lean against, but he still feels like he’s sitting on the floor of an unsteady canoe. His hearing’s still wrong as well, fading in and out, failing to pinpoint properly.

The other man, after some effort and hissing through gritted teeth, manages to arrange himself into a sitting position at Matt’s side. He’s more than a foot away, but Matt’s other senses are thankfully all still intact, and he can feel the warmth radiating from the other man’s skin, even across the gap and through their clothing.

It’s hotter than it should be, actually. Kimi’s feverish.

He’s wearing dollar-store shampoo. Mitchum body wash. A faint tinge of yesterday’s lemon salmon on his breath, covered by more recent coca-cola and a hard-boiled egg, as well as the heavy flavor of a protein shake. The acrid burn of fear in the pores of his skin, a by-product of stress hormones—an unsettling smell that’s impossible to hide.

Beneath that, of course, is Kimi’s own personal smell. It’s that baseline, identifying smell that everybody has, the one that’s dictated by body chemistry, diet, genetics, and all of the little things that a person can’t readily change about themselves. Kimi’s is a warm, earthy scent, with a tinge of salt, not unlike the smell of a sandy beach at high tide.

There’s something uncomfortably familiar about that smell. _Has_ he met this man before? Or maybe a brother of his? Sometimes family members can smell eerily similar, like Foggy, whose entire extended family has the same tinge of _garlic_ to them that can’t be mistaken.

“What is your name?” Kimi asks, interrupting Matt’s train of thought.

“Matt,” he replies automatically. No way he’s giving the other man his full name, not when ‘Kimi’ won’t even give him his in return.

“Matt,” Kimi repeats with an edge of finality. He reaches out uncertainly, bridging the gap between them, fingertips brushing the wool of Matt’s jacket.

Matt takes his hand and grips it firmly. Kimi has a strong handshake. A friendly one. His fingers are long and strong, blunt-tipped, no hangnails or chewed edges to catch on Matt’s palm. But there’s a faint tremble that ruins the illusion of unshaken strength, and his palm is ever-so-slightly damp. Clammy.

“Did they drug you too?” Matt asks. The other man seems to be handling it very well, if that’s the case.

“No.” Kimi shifts where he sits, but he isn’t lying. It’s an uncomfortable truth, though.

Matt wants to know why. What could possibly be so shameful about being captured by yakuza? “What did they do? Did they hurt you? Threaten you?” He pauses, waits for a response, and then says, tentatively, “…Are they the ones who broke your leg?” He’s put it together now. The limping, the pained breathing, the low-grade fever.

“No,” Kimi says again. Strangely, he isn’t lying. There’s a hint of tremble in his breathing, though, like he wants to say something else.

Matt waits.

Somewhere beyond the thick concrete walls, there’s a loud _crack_ ing noise, like a heavy stick being smashed against the floor.

A sharp spike of pain drives itself through Matt’s skull. Kimi flinches impressively as well, and then cusses under his breath in Japanese.

Matt, as the pain recedes, recognizes the noise—distantly, but perhaps it means his hearing is beginning to return properly—as the smashing sound that a forklift makes when it lowers a pallet too quickly to the ground. He’s heard it a lot lately, what with all of the construction sites all around New York after the invasion.

“I think we’re in a warehouse,” he muses, lowering his chin to his knees, curling and uncurling his toes in his shoes and wishing he could just close his eyes and sleep a little, shut out the entire situation.

“That would make sense,” Kimi says, but there’s a new tension in his shoulders that doesn’t recede. Another layer of anxiety—fear of the mysterious noises on the other side of that door.

They may not have much time. Matt turns to him. He puts on his best, most persuasive ‘Trust me, I’m your lawyer _,’_ voice and says, “Why are we here, Kimi?”

Kimi shifts in his direction, and then drops his head back against the wall with a gentle _thunk._ His hands clench and unclench together in his lap. His calluses rasp together like sandpaper. He’s the sort of man who does a lot of physical work—but that was already apparent from the density of his slim, wiry frame. Matt could feel it when the man touched him, the resonating strength in his bones and muscles.

That’s not the kind of strength a man gets just from lifting weights. It’s the kind of strength that comes from a life of manual labor. Working. Fighting, maybe.

“I…” Kimi swallows audibly. “I don’t know why you’re here.” He has a soft voice, a gentle, smooth way of breathing. There’s just a faint tinge of low, rumbling timbre in his chest when he speaks. It’s a voice that would be well-suited to singing. It doesn’t fit right in this setting, strained and tight on a whisper. “But I am yakuza.”

That admission hangs between them.

“Or, I _was_ ,” he adds, ruefully. “I am no longer on their good side. I—” He swallows again, shakes his head, then mutters, “It doesn’t matter.”

“No, I want to know,” Matt prods. He rolls his shoulders and flexes his hands, trying to get some blood flow past the awkward position behind his back. “What did you do?”

For a moment, he’s sure that Kimi isn’t going to answer, but then the other man shrugs. “It is what I _didn’t_ do, actually.” There’s a whooshing sound as he blows air out past puffed lips. “They hired me to intimidate. Get debtors to pay. Hit them a bit if they don’t. Nothing big. I haven’t been able to get a job that pays well enough for… well. The yakuza pay very well. And I already had a cousin with them.”

“You refused to beat someone up?” Matt guesses.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “I told them I don’t hurt children. Or cripples.”

“Are those your rules?” It’s funny how often gang members and criminals will have lines they won’t cross. No wonder he feels such kinship with them, with the dark side.

“They were supposed to be.” Kimi sighs heavily. “Had he not been such a good man—a _respectable_ man—I might have done it. I probably would have.”

“But they wanted you to hurt his child?” Matt concludes.

“Whose child?”

“The… respectable man?”

“Oh. No. The man himself was blind.”

Matt’s stomach tightens. “Who was it?” he asks, with some trepidation.

“A lawyer.” He shrugs. “Some white guy. I might not have cared, but he was blind, and he helped one of my flatmates out of a shoplifting charge.” He sighs, and it sounds like he’s angry at himself. “I should have just done it. I didn’t owe him anything. They just wanted me to scare him.”

“So you refused.”

“Yes.”

“And they… hired someone to break your leg?” After all, he’d said it wasn’t yakuza that did it.

“No.” He rubs his face with both hands, pressing his palms into his eyes. “They sent me after someone else. And _that_ person broke my leg.”

Right. “And you’re here, now, because of that?”

“Yes. I failed twice. The yakuza don’t accept failure.” He sucks in a breath, and then releases it slowly, dropping his hands to his thighs, handcuffs jangling. “They probably just sent someone else after that lawyer. I didn’t save him from anything.”

Sounds about right, considering their current situation.

Kimi keeps talking, still halting, pausing at times to search for the right words. “They took me out of the hospital and threw me in here. I’ve been here for less than a day. They brought you in maybe a couple of hours ago. Hard to tell. I don’t have my watch.” He says those last two sentences with a sense of finality, like he’s wrapping up a long story, rather than meting out vague information one sentence at a time.

The silence stretches again. Matt wishes he had his arms free. He wants to pat the guy on the shoulder, or something. It’s a rough world that punishes a man for having scruples, but Matt already knows all about that.

Dad used to mention that, sometimes. Matt didn’t really understand at the time, too young, but Dad had been getting offers to throw fights for money, significantly more than he’d get for winning them. He turned down those offers several times, Matt assumes, judging by the sour way that Dad would come home, head in his hands, and say _Lord save me from my own integrity._ He’d hug Matt extra hard, then fan out the meager money from his winnings on the table, like a dealer cutting cards.

The one time he didn’t hug Matt was the one time he threw a fight. There was a lot more money that time, but he left it in the envelope, ashamed. Matt wishes he could tell him he understood. Wishes he could tell him how _proud_ he is, even if Dad had to give in, just the once. That he understands now. It’s harder to fight once you’ve given into darkness the first time. It’s harder to change direction.

Kimi’s voice startles him out of his thoughts. “You’re very calm,” he murmurs. His voice is flat, now, like talking let all of the air out of him. “Why are you here, Matt?”

“Well, uh…” A strange mixture of warmth and guilt vie for dominance in Matt’s stomach. “You just kind of explained it to me. I’m Matthew Murdock.”

There’s a long pause.

And then, “ _Oh_.” There’s almost joy in that single, relieved syllable, the brief flash of positivity, of recognition and camaraderie. It’s quickly followed by a low, crushed, “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.” Kimi says, verging on morose.

“Don’t be.” Matt stretches out his leg and nudges the other man’s foot, careful not to bump the injured one. He doesn’t know what he would’ve done if this man had come after him at his apartment, or at his practice. He almost would’ve _had_ to take the beating to keep from revealing his alter ego, and that would have been a hell of an ordeal. He’s still sore from his stake-out just last night; it had gone wrong and ended with him fighting an unexpectedly powerful yakuza thug. He doesn’t need more bruises on his body. Claire isn’t around to fix it anymore. “I appreciate that you refused to beat me up.”

Kimi grunts non-committally. “Might’ve worked out better for you if I had.”

Possibly. Matt likely wouldn’t be in a yakuza holding cell in that case. He forces a light tone. “I might’ve given you more of a fight than you’d think.”

Rather than answer, Kimi huffs through his nose, a disbelieving sound, but Matt imagines that he can sense the faint crack of a smile.

A comfortable silence settles between them.

That awful disorientation has faded. He’s not really sure why. Maybe it’s because the drugs are wearing off, or maybe it’s because he’s stopped exacerbating it by trying to move. Either way, Matt finally manages to focus a little.

First thing he turns his attention to is Kimi himself.

The man isn’t in good shape. His stomach’s rumbling—hungry, and exhaustion hangs from every breath. He’s cold in just his thin t-shirt and jeans, bare feet and arms folded against each other, muscles tight to keep from shivering.

When matt leans in closer, he can hear the faint sound of bone on bone in the man’s leg.

Claire had asked what a hairline fracture sounds like.

 _Like an old ship,_ Matt had said, glad that she didn’t ask any further questions, because he doesn’t like to think about the really bad breaks. The bad ones that actually hurt to listen to. They sound like bonfires, scraping and popping like flame-weakened wood as the two ragged edges of bone continue to grind against each other, blood rushing past, tendons straining to hold the misplaced pieces together. If Kimi was taken to a hospital, he wasn’t there for very long. The leg isn’t splinted. It isn’t even set. It must be excruciating.

Rather than comment on that, Matt turns his attention elsewhere.

Beyond the door, the mechanical noises have stopped. He can hear the lapping of waves against concrete, the rush of wind through a wide space, the cries of seagulls bouncing off of the high walls of a loading bay. Their little makeshift cell is probably in some sort of storage housing, he assumes, the kind that might hold shipping equipment, or perhaps be used to dry-dock a smaller boat.

The smell of blood, he realizes, is coming from the center of the floor in their little room. It’s old, but still present, dried into the porous cement.

 -oOo-

Some time passes, maybe an hour. It’s hard to tell.

He meditates a bit, trying to chase the last drugs from his system the way that Stick taught him, frowning when he finds nothing out of the ordinary, no apparent culprit for his symptoms. He digs deeper, trying to block out everything but his own breathing and the internal workings of his blood and heart.

He feels better. He sits up, moves his head, and it doesn’t even feel like there was something wrong in the first place.

Beside him, Kimi’s started to doze in and out. The man’s a quiet sleeper. Soft breathing without any hint of snore, relaxing against the cement like it’s feather-stuffed. That’s probably just the exhaustion. When a man gets tired enough, everything feels like a bed.

He hardly sleeps for longer than a handful of minutes at a time, though, jerking awake repeatedly with a sharp inhale, like he’s suddenly remembered something terrible—perhaps like he’s just remembered that he’s a dead man to the yakuza, certainly terrifying enough—and after the fourth or fifth time that he does this, he covers the sound with an awkward, self-conscious cough.

“Sorry,” Kimi mutters, raising a hand and running it through his short hair.

“For what?” Matt asks, drawing himself smoothly out of the depths of meditation.

His shirt drags against the wall as he shrugs. “For getting you into this.”

Matt considers this. “I think I got myself into it.”

Kimi nods slowly. “Why did you do it?”

Matt shrugs as well. “It’s my job. I try to bring down the bad guys. I try to protect the good ones.” Funny how that applies pretty evenly to both sides of him. Just one side’s a little more of a bad guy himself. “I wanted to see if I could find some sort of paper trail that would help me drag them to court. They're good at hiding their activities behind legitimate business, but I know the yakuza have been killing a lot of people over drug debts and turf wars.”

“They have,” Kimi agrees. “I’m glad that I have not yet had to kill anyone.”

He isn’t lying. Matt’s more relieved than he’d expect. “Why did you get into it?”

Kimi abruptly looks down, as if considering his own palms, even in the dark.

Matt waits.

“I needed money,” Kimi finally says, so quietly that it’s practically under his breath. “I have a day job. I work as a deliveryman. But that doesn’t pay well enough. I started working with the yakuza, and that does give me enough. It is as simple as that.”

Matt wants to ask what Kimi needs all of this money for, but he doesn’t want the other man to shut down again.

“You probably hear that all of the time,” Kimi continues, with a hint of bitterness. “You probably think it’s a stupid reason.”

Matt shakes his head automatically. “I think…” He smiles a little. “I think that when this is all over, when we get out of here, you should come meet with me. I can help you get out of this. Whatever it is. Debt. Blackmail. I can help you.”

Kimi breathes for a moment. “I don’t think you can help me.”

“I can try.”

 -oOo-

More time passes. Matt would guess that it’s getting close to dawn, and his internal sense of time is generally pretty good.

Kimi falls asleep again, but this time it’s the deep, restful kind. Matt wishes he could do the same, but the best he manages is a very, very light doze.

After a while, the inevitable hum of distant engines jerks him out of his daze.

They’re still far away, but they’re getting closer.

“Hey,” Matt says. He reaches over with his foot again and prods Kimi in the side. “Wake up.”

The other man’s jerks awake. He straightens instinctively as if to stand, then sinks back with a muffled groan, smothering it with the inside of his wrist.

Matt winces—he hears those bones grinding together—but keeps talking. “I think somebody’s coming.”

“Oh.” Kimi’s voice is soft, but his heartbeat, already back to a steady clip from the pain, ratchets up to a gallop.

“Calm down,” Matt says. He leans over, intending to bump their shoulders together—an automatic thing that he’s picked up from Foggy over the years—only to be hit with the worst wave of vertigo yet.

He almost vomits right then, the sour taste of his late-lunch tuna sandwich hovering at the back of his throat.

Kimi’s hands are back on him, between his shoulder blades, patting awkwardly, an out of place ‘there, there’ motion while Matt presses his forehead to his knees and swallows a few times. “Were you hit on the head?”

“Ugh. No,” Matt says, and then, as the nausea roils in his stomach, amends, “I don’t _think_ so.” Where is this _coming_ from? He was feeling fine just a few seconds ago.

The room is spinning again. Whenever Foggy asks Matt about things like dizziness, head-rushes, the spins, whether blind guys get all of those, Matt always answers some version of _Sure we do, asshole._ But every time he has to bite his tongue on the next words that threaten to slip out: _I get it a hell of a lot worse than you do._

The cars outside have parked, engines cutting out. Several pairs of feet on gravel, then on concrete. Low, male voices in quiet Japanese, still fairly far away, but walking toward their door.

The nausea increases, as does Kimi’s heartbeat.

For a wild, illogical second, Matt wonders if it’s Kimi that’s doing this to him somehow, but that notion passes quickly, in favor of listening, as hard as his spinning ears can, as a key turns in the door’s lock.

It swings open. Sound—and _light_ , judging from the way that Kimi whips his head in that direction and then holds a steady gaze—spills into the room. Salt-tinged wind swirls through the room, accompanied by gasoline from the cars, and gun oil.

Multiple feet step over the threshold, and it takes Matt more concentration than usual to separate them out into three separate people. Two men in worn, cotton worker’s clothes—the swish of jeans, the high whine of windbreaker jacket material rubbing against itself—and a third, smaller, older man in a heavy wool coat.

“ _Konichiwa, Kimi-chan_.” One of the two larger men says this. He’s middle-aged, smoker-voiced, and the contempt is palpable in his tone.

Kimi doesn’t respond. His hands—the twin spots of warm weight, a comforting anchor on Matt’s spinning senses—lift from their place on Matt's back and instead fold together in Kimi’s lap. It’s an unexpectedly mild gesture, like a CEO settling into his office chair for a meeting.

“Kimiyaki,” the other thug says soberly. He smells somewhat familiar as well, similar to Kimi’s scent. The cousin Kimi mentioned, perhaps?

Kimi doesn’t answer him either. Instead, he addresses the old man in the coat. “Hello, Mister Nishi,” Kimi says, quietly. He tilts his face toward the ground, a makeshift bow.

The old man makes an impatient sound in the back of his throat, and says something sharp in Japanese.

Nobody so much as acknowledges Matt.

He’s fine with that. He doubts he could respond anyway. He’s still reeling. The nausea is only getting steadily worse, senses fading in and out erratically, and the staccato beat of Kimi’s heartbeat beside him isn’t helping.

Before Matt knows what’s happening, one of the thugs, the smoker—God, Matt can smell it so thick in the man’s clothing, he nearly vomits on the man’s shoes—crosses the room and takes hold of Matt’s upper arm roughly. He pulls, and when Matt fails to get to his feet, simply drags Matt across the floor.

Matt doesn’t fight him. The cement drags at the material of his trousers, scuffing the tops of his shoes as his legs trail behind him. A few steps later, and he’s through the door. Wind whips his face and his hair, and the pale warmth of an early-morning sun is beginning to heat the concrete nearby. The farther he gets from that room, the more the nausea fades with each breath of salty air.

Back in the room, behind him, Kimi’s saying something in Japanese—protesting, Matt guesses—and then crying out as the other thug forces him to stand.

 _His leg’s broken_ , Matt wants to say, wants to try and maybe defuse the situation a little, but he doesn’t. He stays silent. He can’t fight his way out of this one. Not unless he’s going to kill all of these men. If he fights, they might put two and two together. And he can’t let that happen.

The smoker drags him into the middle of the loading bay. Matt can hear the lap of waves drawing closer, and for a moment, he hopes that maybe these men will slip up, let him too close to the water, and he can just swim for it. But no. They come to a halt more than a few paces away, too far to make it without being shot.

A few meters away, Matt hears Kimi limp to a halt, half-supported by his cousin’s arm under his shoulder. Kimi's body is practically _singing_ in pain, but he doesn’t make a sound.

The old man approaches Matt. The smoker hovers at Matt’s side, presumably to keep Matt from trying anything, but he doesn’t seem very on guard. Why should he be? What can a blind man do, really?

“You cause me trouble,” the old man, Mr. Nishi, says. His hands are in his pockets. He moves with a certain frailty, and there’s an odd hinging noise coming from his steps that Matt’s come to associate with someone who’s had an artificial hip replacement. Mr. Nishi doesn’t seem angry. In fact, there’s no apparent emotion in his voice, just cold professionalism. “You will not cause me trouble any more.”

Matt swallows. That sounds like _I’m about to have you shot in the head_ territory. He tries for a smile. “I’m sorry. I, uh,” he blinks once, drawing attention to his unfocused gaze—which he can never really control even when he wants to; his eyes tend to wander around in his head of their own accord—and then says, “I’m not sure I know why I’m here.”

That seems to stump the old man for a moment. “No?”

Matt tilts his head up at him. “No.”

“Hmm.” The old man turns to Kimi. He speaks in English for Matt's benefit, unexpectedly courteous. “You did not explain it to him?”

Kimi seems to be pretty quick on the fly, and he joins Matt in the lie. “He was unconscious.” He speaks with a noticeable stutter now, shivering.

“Ah.” The old man turns back to Matt. He places a heavy hand on Matt’s shoulder, like a comforting grandfather. It’s an effort not to shrug him off. The man’s soft voice and gestures do not cancel out the underlying aggression in his stance, in his tone. “No matter,” he says. “This is not about you, really. It is merely killing two birds with one stone.”

Right. Getting rid of a legal nuisance _and_ a non-loyal underling.

The man turns to Kimi again. “You failed me. You disobeyed. I give you a second chance. Normally, I do not do things this way, but…” He gestures in the direction of the younger thug, the one with Kimi’s scent. “Shouma asks me to let you try to prove yourself. So I say, ‘You will protect our warehouse. Kill anyone who spies on us.’ And what do you do? You fail again. You get your leg broken. Now what can I do with you?”

Kimi swallows, but doesn’t answer.

His cousin, however, pipes up. “He didn’t stand a chance. Nobody can fight the Devil.”

The devil?

Mr. Nishi nods. “I have heard this. I understand. I am not unreasonable.”

Matt fights to keep his face straight. Did he fight Kimi? When was—?

Matt remembers. Two nights ago. He’d staked out a shipping dock on the east-side, a place with known yakuza ties. It had been raining heavily, with thunder, a cacophony of noise that made Matt’s senses dulled and strange. A handful of guards had stumbled onto him. One of them had been a good fighter, somehow managing to land lucky punches, managing to catch Matt in moments when he was off-balance, but all it had taken was a proper leghold and twist, and he’d snapped the man’s shin and left him there on the wet pavement.

Matt has bruises from that encounter. Kimi throws a good punch. Fighting him had been _difficult_ , which is not something he can say about most opponents.

“But,” Mr. Nishi says, drawing Matt back into the present, “Now we will end this. I will do right by you, Shouma. I will give him one last chance. Give your gun to him.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the younger thug reaches into his jacket, pulls out a heavy piece of metal—Matt can smell the harsh gun polish, can hear the metal clink against the rings on his fingers—and then hands it grip-first to Kimi.

Kimi’s heartbeat stutters. The stench of stress rolls off of him in waves. He wraps his fingers around the gun gingerly. “What do you want me to do?” he asks, dully.

“You have two options,” Mr. Nishi says. His grip tightens on Matt’s shoulder. “Either you come over here and hit this lawyer man until I tell you to stop…” He pauses, for emphasis. “Or you shoot him in the head right now. I do not care which you choose.”

“I can’t do that. I cannot do either of those things.” Kimi’s response is immediate. He doesn’t even take time to think, or to find a way to phrase it better. He’s shaking his head. “I can’t.”

His cousin sighs, heavily, and his heart is thudding as well. His concern is genuine. He doesn’t want to see his cousin killed. “Come on, Kimi,” he coaxes. “I’ve done what I can for you. If you don’t do this—”

“I won’t.” There’s no strength in Kimi’s voice. Only resignation.

While they speak, Matt considers his options. He could make a dive for it. Nobody’ll expect the blind guy to jump off the dock. He could also try fighting his way out, if he wants to have any chance of Kimi making it out alive, but then what does he do? Kill the yakuza? Swear Kimi to secrecy?

Either way, any option requires his hands to _not_ be cuffed behind him.

He grits his teeth, wraps the fingers of his right hand around his left thumb and—just like Stick taught him, the practical bastard—pulls down and out, neatly dislocating it.

It hurts. Oh, _God_ , it hurts. The world goes dim, and for a second, all he is is a heartbeat and a bundle of firing pain receptors.

He must make a sound, or pull a face or something, because when everything rushes back, the old man is speaking, the bony hand on his shoulder giving him a rough shake. His hearing cuts back in mid-sentence. “—know you do not want to die. Nobody does. But have some dignity, my friend. A man should not go to the other side with tears in his eyes.” He sounds for a moment like Stick, if Stick had had a paternal bone in his body.

 _Like I give a shit._ “Just let me go.” Matt lets the pain fill his voice, hoping that it passes well enough for fear, desperation—a panicked breakdown, not the suppressed agony of breaking his own hand to try and wriggle away like an animal in a trap. He hopes to God that nobody’s looking at his hands. “I haven’t done anything to you. I’m not part of this. Just let me go.”

He can feel all of their gazes on him, but most of all Kimi’s.

As if the other man understands exactly what Matt needs at that moment, Kimi raises his voice. “I have already told you I will not kill him, Mr. Nishi.”

Just like that, all of the eyes lift from Matt and turn back to Kimi. Matt takes advantage of that moment to slip the cuff off of his hand, leaving it dangling from his other wrist. The pain of the dislocation is already fading, dulled by adrenaline.

“That is a shame,” Mr. Nishi says. “You were promising.” He says something in Japanese to Shouma, who unhappily takes the gun back out of Kimi’s slack grip.

“What happens now?” Kimi asks.

Mr. Nishi sighs. “I shoot the lawyer. My men tie you to rocks. They throw you into the ocean and Shouma reports you missing in three days.” He lifts his hand from Matt’s shoulder and reaches into his jacket for his gun. “Your bodies will not be found.”

There’s a terrible finality to his statement, and for the first time since he woke up, Matt feels a true spike of fear.

He isn’t going to die this way. He isn’t going to leave Foggy and Karen to search for him. He can’t let them mourn him without so much as a body to bury.

Mr. Nishi’s hip is right beside Matt’s head, and before he can give himself a moment to stop and really think things through, he drives his elbow into the junction where he can hear the metallic groan of metal against bone.

The implant pops out of its socket. The old man goes down with a yelp—Matt’s never hit an old man before, and he’s sure he’ll feel plenty guilty about it later—and drops down to Matt’s eye level. Matt headbutts him, hard enough to knock him out, and then reaches for his gun.

Matt’s fingers close on cool metal, the weighty density of the gun and its workings all vibrating in his grip. His natural repulsion wars with him, but he hefts it in his hand and, head tilted to the side, making sure he knows exactly what he’s aiming at, points it in the direction of Kimi and the thugs.

Kimi—either somehow on Matt’s wavelength, or perhaps terrified of being accidentally shot by the blind guy—immediately drops to the cement.

The other two waver uncertainly.

“You’re blind,” one of them, the smoker, says.

“I’m pointing in the right direction though, aren’t I?” Matt asks, hand steady. He rests his finger on the trigger. “I figure there’s a lot of bullets in this thing. Something’s bound to hit you. Do you really want to take that chance?"

Kimi’s cousin doesn’t. That’s obvious. He has his hands up, then lowers them, obviously feeling foolish.

The smoker, however—apparently willing to take the gamble—breaks away. Matt consciously stills his arm, keeps his head pointed forward, not tracking the motion, scrambling to think of a way to handle this without giving away his secret.

He definitely isn’t going to actually shoot at them. He can’t do that.

The smoker makes it several paces, and Matt’s ready to let him go, write him off—he and Kimi are alive, and that’s more than he’d been expecting a minute ago—but then Kimi snakes out an arm, catches his ankle, and sends him crashing back to the ground.

The smoker rolls back to his feet with startling speed. He lashes a kick at Kimi's head. Kimi blocks with an upraised arm and catches the man’s foot again, this time twisting hard, using his low leverage on the ground to throw the man off-balance. They tangle on the ground. Smoker throws a punch; Kimi blocks, returning with a lightning-fast left jab that audibly breaks the man’s jaw.

Matt moves in the direction of the fight, concentrating to try and differentiate who hits whom. He hears the grunt of fists hitting flesh, the scrape of a metal belt buckle against the cement. He hears the thin  _rip-tear_ as that windbreaker is caught in Kimi's grip and then abandoned, the smoker twisting his arms from its sleeves and then gasping as Kimi drives an elbow into his temple. He hears Kimi’s cousin back away from the brawl, taking advantage of the confusion to take off, footsteps fading toward the cars where Matt knows they’re parked around the other side of the building.

He lets him go.

By the time Matt gets to Kimi’s side, the fight’s over. Smoker’s limp on the ground. Kimi’s sprawled out beside him, one arm thrown over his eyes, perhaps to block out the sun.

“Kimi?” Matt says.

“What was all that about shooting them?” Kimi mutters, low enough that Matt has to focus to hear him properly, only half-enunciating his words. “I thought you were going to shoot.” If he’s accusatory, it’s only in a passing, half-hearted kind of way. He’s breathing hard, on his back, one hand hovering to his bleeding nose, the other drifting—as if afraid to even touch—toward his leg.

“I tried. The trigger wouldn’t pull,” Matt lies, making sure that he seems appropriately sheepish.

Kimi reaches over and slips the gun from Matt’s hand. “You left the safety on,” he says. There’s no condemnation in his words, only a bone-deep weariness.

“Oh.” Matt smiles. “I’ve never shot a gun.”

“That makes sense,” Kimi says. There’s a glazed feel to his words, to the slow, steady beat of his heart, the stuttering shiver in his breaths. He points the gun half-heartedly at the unconscious thug.

Matt waits. “You alright?”

There’s a long silence. Kimi lets his head drop back to the ground, lowering the gun to rest on his stomach. “I think… I’ve gone as far as I can go,” he mumbles.

Matt sits down beside him. “Yeah. Okay.” He drops a hand to Kimi’s arm and gives the bicep a reassuring squeeze, feeling the braille-like goosebumps standing out against his bare skin.

Kimi watches passively as Matt pats the smoker's trousers, finding a sleek cell phone in a front pocket. “Are you calling the police?” he asks.

Matt nods. He feels Kimi’s instinctive avoidance, the automatic tense and release of his stomach, like he might just get up and walk off, injuries be damned. He _is_ yakuza, after all. Going to the authorities won’t really be in his repertoire of options.

“Don’t worry,” Matt tells him, even as he runs his thumb across the buttons—thank God it isn’t a touch-screen—and dials 911. “You’ll have some damn good legal representation.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Now that I'm on break, I'm going to try to churn these out once a week.  
> Thanks for all of the lovely comments. I've never written fanfic before, but the comments definitely make me want to write more.

Matt sits in the hospital room with the police officer and tries to remember how long it has been since he’s been in this kind of situation.

He comes up with nothing and grimaces. Never. The answer is never.

As a vigilante, he always leaves before the police show up. As a lawyer, he tends to show up after the statement’s been taken.

It’s unexpectedly jarring to be caught right in the middle of the process. He’s the “victim,” and therefore can’t really do much. No action to take. He doesn’t like that. He’s a man of action. Sitting around and waiting makes his skin crawl.

Across from him, seated round-shouldered on the physician’s rolling stool, the police officer is making wet, smacking noises with his mouth while he thinks. He’s in constant motion, scooting a few inches forward, a few inches back, a few inches forward, again and again, apparently unaware of the high squeaking noise that the wheels make against the linoleum.

“Alright. I’m just going to need you to go over this with me one more time.”

Matt nods. The wax paper crinkles beneath him as he shifts on the examination table.

“You’re doing great,” the man adds, flipping absently through the pages on his lap, papers rustling against the stiff material of his pants. He’s already said that multiple times, voice tilted high like he’s speaking to a small child.

Matt nods again. He keeps his hands folded in his lap, tracing and retracing the temporary splint on his swollen thumb, the bristling fibers rasping against the pads of his fingers, the painkillers—that a nurse _insisted_ he take before the joint could be reset—acting like a cloudy film at the edges of his thoughts. He’s been in this hospital for less than two hours, and he’s already half-seriously considering escape routes. If he made a run for it, would the officer try to stop him? He isn’t being charged with anything, after all...

But no. He gives himself a little shake. He’s already agreed to stay and give his statement. Also, he has that Yakuza thug, Kimi, to think about. He has to see him before he leaves. He can’t really explain why, but he _has_ to.

It’s because he owes him, Matt tells himself, feeling a little guilty. Sure, the man’s a criminal—Kimi already admitted that he beats people up for extra cash—but Matt can feel that he’s not an evil man. Kimi put himself on the line on Matt’s behalf.

_And you broke his leg_ , Matt thinks, wincing. Can’t forget that piece of the puzzle. Both sides of Matt are attached to this guy, the lawyer and the vigilante. This must be rectified.

A few doors down, there’s an old man with dementia shouting at nurses. Matt tries and fails to block him out.

Matt also tried—he _really_ tried—to convince the police that he didn’t need to go to the hospital. They didn’t listen, of course. There’s no way that they would. The first officer on-scene—a policewoman that he’s actually met before while conducting courtroom business—had treated him like a man in shock, hushing his protests and wrapping him cocoon-tight in a terry-cloth blanket that smelled like other people’s cold sweats.

Four ambulances total. Two for the unconscious yakuza. One for Kimi’s broken leg. One for Matt, as he sat there in the rattling metal box, EMT at his side, feeling silly with an ice pack on his swollen thumb.

He wonder’s if the old man’s hip is salvageable.

Matt knows the old man’s somewhere in the building, but he can’t hear him. The smoker, too, for sure, but the white noise of the air-conditioning drowns out anything on the other floors. Clare told him once that they do that on purpose. A bit of white noise keeps the patients from hearing each other. It helps a patient feel like he has a bit of solitude, which is generally for the best. They say that misery loves company, but nobody wants to listen to the patient next door cough and hack, and nobody wants to hear the demented ravings of the old man down the hall who thinks his Vietnamese nurse is a VietCong spy.

It’s just Matt’s luck that the white noise only blocks out so much for his heightened senses. He purses his lips and reminds himself that plugging his ears with his fingers isn’t going to win him any points with this policeman.

Kimi’s somewhere around here as well. The hospital staff will be treating him well, of course. They’re all cut from Claire’s gib, compassionate and no-nonsense. Hopefully they’ll keep the police off of him until Matt can get a chance to talk to him.

“Okay.” The policeman jerks him from his brooding. “We’re talking about four attackers total, as far as you know.”

“Three,” Matt corrects automatically. “The man with the broken leg was a victim as well. He was not a kidnapper.” He’s already said this. He fights down the annoyance that’s threatening his tone. He smooths it into a mild detachment.

“Right. That’s right.” More paper shuffling. “Good. Um…” He trails off, still apparently failing to find the paper he’s looking for.

This officer is one of the dozens of recruits brought in to help fill the vacancies left from the corruption scandal a few months back. He’s new, and it shows.

The shuffling ceases. “Are you _sure_ that man--?”

A pair of heavy footsteps comes down the hallway, moving toward him. Matt recognizes them. Rolling from the heel, slightly scuffing where the inner arches of the shoes rub against each other—pigeon-toed, just a bit.

“Foggy,” he says, gratefully, just as those shoes round the corner.

They pause at his voice, turn, and then after a brief inhale, Foggy says, “ _Matt_.”

The sound of his best friend’s voice takes the last bit of strength from Matt’s shoulders a split second before Foggy’s arms are around them. Matt’s enveloped in the mixed smells of garlic, high-quality cologne, wool, and an underlying tinge of alcohol from the night before.

“God,” Foggy’s saying, squeezing him hard enough to make his ribs groan. “It’s good to see you, man.”

Matt hums in agreement, patting Foggy on the back.

The officer, standing now, clears his throat.

Foggy turns around. He looks the officer up and down and, judging by the sudden shift in posture, finds the man lacking. “We done here? I think it’s safe to say you’ve got enough info to be starting with.”

“I just have a few more questions,” the officer says, a little uncertain. “Protocol. You understand.”

Foggy doesn’t move. His ringing silence very clearly does _not_ understand.

“It’s fine,” Matt says, cutting through the tension, giving the officer a bit of slack. “Go ahead.”

The officer licks his lips, more of those audible, wet mouth sounds that has Matt’s teeth on edge. “Do you remember any distinguishing features?” he asks, finally. There’s the dutiful of scratching pencil nub against paper, writing who-knows-what, maybe just scribbling to give his hands something to do.

God, Matt’s so tired. He can’t get the stench of antiseptic out of his nose. Every inch of this little hospital room is drenched in the stuff. That high, mosquito-like whine of the halogen lights is beginning to get on his nerves. He’s surrounded by suffering, by the cacophony of failing hearts and labored breaths and grinding bones and tension-filled voices that pervades all hospitals, in all of the little rooms around him, up and down the hallway. It’s starting to get to him.

When Matt takes too long to respond, the policeman pauses his scratching. Perhaps taking Matt’s silence as confusion, he helpfully explains, “I’m talking tattoos? Facial hair? Any odd scars?”

Matt quirks a tiny smile. He keeps his face pointed downward, tilted at an angle. Normally, he tries to at least point his face in the general direction of whoever he’s talking to, but right now he can’t even muster that little bit of polite effort.

“Tattoos…” Foggy repeats after a beat, incredulous. “You do know those don’t really come in braille, right?”

“ _Oh,_ um…” The officer’s heart does an anxious little _ka-thump_ , and he scrambles to apologize. “I’m sorry sir, I just was… um… standard protocol. You know.”

“You are aware this man is blind.” Foggy’s hand is still on Matt’s shoulder. His tone is joking, but Matt can hear the thread of steel beneath it. 

“Foggy…” Matt admonishes half-heartedly, reaching out to pat his friend’s arm.

He can feel Foggy turn that frown on him. Foggy’s wide palm finds its way back to Matt’s shoulder, a protective motion that’s bled over from back when they were roommates and Foggy would physically place himself between Matt and obstacles. “No. I think we’re done here.” Foggy turns back to the officer and says, “If you have any follow-up questions, you have his number.” He waits, and when the policeman doesn’t move, he makes a little shooing motion with one hand, flapping in the air, “We’re done. Have a good day.”

The police officer leaves the room.

As his steps echo down the hall, Matt tilts his head up toward Foggy. “Feel better?” he asks, wryly.

“Brett told me about this guy,” Foggy mutters. His hand tightens on Matt’s shoulder. He whips his head away from the door, scowl audible. “And _no_. I don’t. You got fucking _kidnapped_ , dude. It’ll take more than telling off a shitty cop to make me feel better.”

“But telling off shitty cops is practically your superpower,” Matt says, injecting a humor that he doesn’t feel.

If Foggy notices Matt’s reticence, he apparently decides to ignore it. “My _mutant_ power, maybe,” he jokes, with a derisive snort. “None of the perks, all of the social ostracism.”

Matt shrugs. “I don’t know. There was that one guy a few months back. The fireman who couldn’t be burned. Seemed like a perk to me.”

“Until he got his face plastered all over the news,” Foggy says, already settling in for a debate, only to catch himself and shake his head. “No. That doesn’t matter.” He flaps his hands, dismissing the change in subject. “But seriously, man. I can’t believe this happened. You were _kidnapped_. Do you think they know…?” He doesn’t ask the obvious, not in public, but he sags when Matt shakes his head. “Good. That’s… that’s good.”

Matt sighs and runs his uninjured hand through his hair. It’s gritty against his fingers. He wishes he could take a shower. “So what have you heard? What’re the police saying?”

Foggy sits back, crossing his arms. “How should I know? They aren’t giving me any info. Brett said he’d oversee this job—I called in a personal favor from his mom, and Brett’s the best man on the force right now, you and I both know it—but I don’t have any professional privileges here. You aren’t being charged with anything, of course, and we aren’t going to be representing any of the scumbags who jumped you, obviously.”

Matt lets that statement hang for a moment.

Foggy’s frown is back. “We aren’t. Right, Matt?”

Matt can’t keep the wry twist off of his mouth.

“ _Matt_.”

“I made a promise, Foggy. But—“

“Oh, come _on_ , dude. What is it with you?” Now he’s starting with the gesticulating, disturbing the air around Matt’s face. “I am _not_ going to legally represent some Yakuza brass-knuckle that kidnapped you. I don’t care if he convinced you that he’s ‘seen the light’ or whatever.” He pauses, hand gesticulating vaguely, mouth working as he tries to find the proper words to voice his disapproval. “That is, like, a mistrial waiting to happen. I can’t be held responsible for my actions, man. I’d probably throw something at them in the courtroom, and it would be very unprofessional to get arrested for assaulting my own client.”

Matt feels a real smile threatening his lips. To think Stick actually tried to talk him into ditching the best ally he’s ever had.

The gesticulations pause. “What are you smiling about?” Foggy demands.

With effort, Matt straightens his expression. “What about a guy who helped me, Foggy?”

There's a long silence. “That’s not fair, Matt.”

“A guy who, when threatened with death, refused to shoot me,” Matt continues. “Refused to even _hit_ me,”

Finally, Foggy sighs, and Matt knows he's already won. Even so, Foggy has to keep up the impression of a fight. He pokes a finger into the center of Matt’s chest accusingly. “I will meet with him. That is all I’m going to promise you.”

Matt grins and lets Foggy have his dignity. “That’s all I could ask for.”

 -oOo-

Matt gets discharged pretty quickly after that. The hospital, as it turns out, is a lot more willing to let the injured blind man walk out if there’s someone to keep an eye on him.

As the discharge nurse is walking them out, Matt asks about Kimi.

She pushes a clipboard with papers into Matt’s hands. He holds them for a second, then passes them to Foggy, who signs them and passes them back. “The Japanese man with the tattoos?” she asks, lifting them back out of his hands.

He actually has no idea. “The one with the broken leg,” he clarifies.

“Yeah, he’s in surgery right now,” she says. “Too much damage to the leg. They have to do some reconstruction on the knee, from what I hear.”

Matt winces. “When will he get out?”

“Not sure,” the nurse says. “He should be in recovery soon enough, but after that, I’m told the police are taking him straight into custody. Too bad. He’s quiet. Not like the other two.” She huffs. “Lord, do they know how to complain.”

“The old man’s doing alright?”

“The old man is a pain in my ass,” she says mildly. “But he’s fine.”

A weight that Matt wasn’t even aware of lifts from his shoulders. “Good.”

At his side, Foggy makes an annoyed sound through his nose and mutters, “All the better to indict him.”

“You’re not even on his case, Foggy.”

Foggy bumps his shoulder. “But I’ll be cheering from the sidelines at his trial.”

While they walk to the cab, Foggy makes a few calls. Matt half-listens as Foggy calls to update Karen and then calls Brett to insist that he be assigned as the ex-Yakuza’s legal representation. Matt can hear Brett’s surprise through the speaker, but he knows Foggy will convince him.

He turns his attention to the city around them. When they get into the cab, he presses his cheek to the window and listens to the other cars and the pedestrians and general chaotic roar of life that filters in, tinny and odd through the hard barrier of the glass.

They go to Foggy’s place, not Matt’s. There’s no way Matt’s going back to his place until he’s at one hundred percent again and knows he can handle any Yakuza who might show. He _did_ get their boss into police custody, after all. He has to be on quite a few shit lists now.

While Matt showers, Foggy scrounges up some of Matt’s old clothes that somehow ended up in Foggy’s closet. While Foggy heats up some Chinese leftovers, Matt sits down on the couch and then, slowly, sinks down until his head is on the armrest. The familiar sounds and smells of Foggy’s apartment waft around him—faded tobacco from the previous tenant, the hum of traffic outside, the groaning clank of the water heater, and the acidic smell of the spot cleaner in the carpet. He runs his fingers along the coarse fabric of the couch cushion and listens to the low tones of the news on television—riots in Japan. Some ‘enhanced’ or ‘mutant’ or something destroyed an entire city block. People are calling for government regulation, protective programs.

He’s too tired to worry about that. In the kitchen, he can hear Foggy humming and fiddling with his rickety microwave.

Matt closes his eyes and presses his nose into the cushion. He’s asleep before the food’s ready.

 -oOo-

Bright and early the next morning, Matt and Foggy leave the apartment and head toward the police station.

It’s a cool, drizzly day. The only professional clothing Matt had at Foggy’s apartment was an old summertime suit that somehow got packed in with Foggy’s clothing when they moved from their college dorm. Foggy assures him that it’s still in style—and is only _kind_ of lying when he says it—but the fabric is thinner than he’d like, and he has to fight down a shiver.

They pass a small bakery, and Foggy snags the New York Times off of a table while the lady behind the counter toasts a cheesy bagel for him.

“Hey, you hear about that shit that’s going down in Japan?”

Matt grunts disinterestedly, chewing his banana and sipping at a paper cup of tea. He doesn’t like this bakery. They use the same machine to make the coffee and the tea. His Earl Grey tastes like coffee filter.

“Sounds like some random businessman got mad at his boss or something. Caused an earthquake with his mind. ‘Almost a city block of property damage,’” he reads aloud. “Killed a lot of people.”

“Let me guess,” Matt says. “There’s a public outrage.” He remembers hearing the story on the news last night. He mostly feels bad for the guy. Where would Matt be, after all, if he had some kind of insane power that he might accidentally unleash on the world? When he gets angry, he puts people in the hospital. Thank God all he has is his bare fists.

“Yup. Sounds like they’re going to be staging some protests in our city soon, too. People want mutants contained,” Foggy says mildly. “You’d think we didn’t have enough to worry about. Aliens. Superheroes. Gods.” He blows air out past his lips, then bites savagely into his bagel. “And now random, normal people who turn out to be mutants.”

They call ahead, and Brett meets them at the door. He’s crisp and professional in his uniform, but Matt can hear the tension in the man’s breathing.

“Something wrong?” Matt asks him

“Oh, everything’s just _peachy,”_ Brett says, with an air of sour humor. “I just have a Yakuza boss in my jail, along with one of his lackeys _and_ a lackey who betrayed him. Do you realize how hard I have to work to protect these guys? And to protect my officers? To make sure they aren’t willing to take a side-bribe and ‘forget’ to properly lock the cell block. To make sure that the ex-Yakuza doesn’t get honor-strangled in his cell. God.” He blows air out past his lips. “It’s a logistical nightmare.” Abruptly, he pauses, a hand on Matt’s shoulder, apparently appraising him. “You alright, man? I’m sorry, I should’ve asked straight off.”

Matt smiles. “I’m fine, Brett.”

“Good.” Brett starts walking again, Foggy and Matt trailing a step behind. “Though I’m not sure if you should be taking this case. If I were you, I’d be making myself scarce. Hiring a bodyguard, maybe.” He half-turns toward Matt again, earnestly. “Do you carry mace? I don’t like the idea of you walking around the city alone. We just don’t have the manpower to run as many patrols as we should.”

If Matt could control his eyes properly, he’d roll them. As it is, he hopes he manages a recognizable approximation of the movement.

Brett laughs. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever, man.” They’re approaching the ‘interview’ rooms, just past the cell block, and he slows to a halt. “Your guy’s in the first room,” he says. There’s a rustling noise as he scratches the back of his head awkwardly. “We’re still trying to scrounge up a translator. You guys don’t know any Japanese, do you?”

“No…” Matt frowns. “Why would we need to? This guys speaks English.”

There’s a long pause, and then Brett heaves a sigh. “That… would have been good to know. He hasn’t exactly been sharing with the class. Haven’t gotten a peep out of him.”

“Nothing at all?” Foggy asks. “Did you read him his rights?”

“Yeah. But he just shrugged whenever we tried to confirm that he understood. He does that a lot.” Brett shrugs illustratively as he says it. “That’s why we figured he didn’t understand.” There’s a jangle of keys as he unlocks the door into the next hallway. “Maybe you guys can figure him out.”

Matt can feel Foggy’s eyes on him. Judging by the silence, it’s an accusing look. Not only is he insisting Foggy take a case that he doesn’t want, but it’s with a potentially uncooperative client.

“Has he been formally charged with anything, yet?” Matt asks.

“No,” Brett says. “While it’s obvious that he is part of the Yakuza, it’s pretty clear now that he was a victim in this specific situation. We have some allegations that we will certainly pursue if he doesn’t cooperate, but for now we’ll hoping he _will_ cooperate.”

“Is that why he’s still here?” Foggy asks.

Bret makes an iffy sound. “We’ve still got another day before we’re legally obliged to let him go, and for now he’s safest where we can see him. If he’s willing to testify against the old man and his right hand, I’m sure we can put them away for a long time. As it is right now, we have kidnapping, attempted homicide, but if I’m being honest, that won’t put them away for long, especially after their lawyers spin it. And it won’t do much of anything to bring down their organization. The old man will have plenty of successors who can step up to the plate.”

They come to a stop outside a doorway. Matt is familiar with the layout of the building, and he recognizes it as the main room used for interviews and interrogations. The long, two-way mirror reflects their voices back at them, instead of absorbing the sound waves like the old, cracking drywall on either side. Matt raises a hand to the cool glass. He can hear Kimi’s heartbeat, slow and steady, on the other side of the wall.

“You ready, Foggy?” He asks.

There’s a long silence and then, surprisingly hesitant, Foggy says, “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do this.”

Matt opens his mouth to ask what’s wrong, but Brett’s already unlocking and opening the door. Inside the room, Kimi’s heartbeat jumps at the sound, ratcheting into a faster clip.

An odd, unexpected wave of nausea sweeps through Matt. He has to clutch at the doorframe, but pushes himself into the room anyway.

As soon as Matt walks into view, Kimi pulls in a breath of recognition. That fearful heartbeat slows again.

By the time Matt finds his chair and sinks into it, the vertigo is already fading. He frowns and adjusts his jacket, hoping that this nausea issue isn’t a symptom of something he should be concerned about. He takes in the details of the room as the sound of his and Foggy’s footsteps echo around and sharpen the image in his head.

Kimi is sitting very, very still in his wheelchair, cuffed hands folded neatly on the table in front of him, leg propped up in the chair, heavy and hollow-sounding in its bandaging and cast. Judging by the way he’s holding himself, they wrap all the way up to the thigh. He sounds a lot healthier than he did yesterday—no wheeze in his breath, no skip in his heartbeat, no shaking. The lack of painful tightness in his breathing indicates that he’s been given some decent painkillers. He smells like hospital antiseptic and soap, with oatmeal and blueberries fresh on his breath.

Matt reflects for a moment on how bad of a situation a person has to be in if a night in a jail cell does them good. “Good morning, Kimi,” he says, testing the waters.

“Hello, Matt,” Kimi says, quiet and low and polite. “It is good to see you.” There’s sincerity in his tone, but it’s balanced with a heavy dose of caution. His head turns, presumably eyeing Foggy.

Foggy leans forward, hand proffered within the short reach of Kimi’s cuffs. “Good to meet you. I’m Franklin Nelson.”

Kimi doesn’t move to take it. He does give Foggy a polite little nod, but the rest of him is statue-still. Matt’s sure that it _looks_ stoic, but he can hear the creak of Kimi’s fingers as they tighten against each other on the table.

Matt puts a hand on Foggy’s back, a tacit signal to sit back.

Foggy leans smoothly back in his chair and continues speaking. “We’re partners in a criminal law firm—right down the block, actually, and we’re here to represent you legally and walk you through your options.”

Kimi breathes in slowly, then out, as if gathering himself. When he speaks, it’s in that same flat tone. “I didn’t ask for representation.”

Matt keeps his expression mild, doesn’t let the confusion show (and hopes Foggy has the wherewithal to do the same). He remembers Kimi’s extreme reticence back in that little cell. This man isn’t prone to over-sharing. He keeps his cards close to his chest. “We’re offering to represent you. I assure you, we have a strong case record.”

Kimi lets him finish, then says, “No.”

Now Matt can’t keep the confusion from his face. “No?”

“Thank you,” Kimi adds, a tacked-on nicety. “But no.”

Why not? Matt bites his tongue to keep from asking. He doesn’t understand. He can’t think of a good reason for this guy to stonewall him. Cooperation is in his best interest.

Just as he’s about to ask anyway, Foggy’s voice appears at his ear. “Can I speak to you for a moment?”

Matt stands wordlessly and follows Foggy out of the room.

As soon as the door shuts, Foggy turns, and Matt has only a moment to bring an arm up before Foggy’s in his personal space, nose-to-nose, hissing, “What the hell, man?”

Automatically, Matt drops a hand to Foggy’s shoulder—suppressing the reflexive jab that would have dropped his law partner to the floor—and eases him back a step. “Use your words, Foggy,” he says jokingly.

Foggy deflates, just as Matt expects, shoulder sagging beneath Matt’s grip. “Dude, you didn’t see that guy’s face. He’s got, like—” Foggy gesticulates vaguely, hand brushing Matt’s sleeve. “Murder eyes.”

Matt scoffs. “He’s just scared.”

“ _He’s_ scared?” Foggy repeats, incredulous. “Okay, okay, okay, I think I see where you’re confused.” He taps his chest, making his voice jump. “ _I’m_ scared. _That_ man… that man in there is not afraid. He was staring me down like he was going to bite me.”

Matt rubs a hand across his face. That doesn’t make sense. Kimi wasn’t a man considering violence. Violent intentions have a specific sound, a specific smell, a certain kind of tension.

Kimi was strained, sure. Nervous. A little cold. But not angry or threatening. “What do you mean?”

Foggy sighs. “You can’t see him, man.”

Matt crosses his arms. “Then tell me what I’m not seeing.”

“You…” Foggy makes a strangled noise, like he does whenever he feels like he’s speaking plainly and Matt doesn’t understand. “Don’t pull that ‘I’m so blind, _I see the true person inside_ ’ bullshit, Matt. I’m not some hot young thing at a bar who wants you to tell him about his _inner self_.”

Matt grins. “That was just the one time,” he argues.

Foggy shakes his head hard, but when he speaks, the humor’s back in his tone. “Several times,” he says. “At _least_ twice. I was there. And each time you ended up with some new person in your bed. It’s madness.”

Matt has no defense. He and Foggy have been friends for too long. The man knows all about his promiscuous, ‘fuck it, I just want to be normal’ phase. “I was drunk.”

“You were extremely drunk.”

They’re both grinning again. Matt debates with himself before opening his mouth once more. “Dude, I’m telling you. This guy isn’t just some thug. I don’t know why he’s playing this game with us, but I do know that he’s scared, and that he needs our help.”

Even while he speaks, Foggy’s running an irritated hand through his hair. “I don’t see it, man. That guy looks dangerous to me. Ain’t nothing going on behind those eyes but homicide. God, right down to the tattoos—he’s a thug from a Japanese martial arts movie. I’m half expecting to see subtitles when he speaks. He looks like…” Foggy glances around furtively, then lowers his voice. “Like the kinds of guys I’ve seen you beating up on the news lately, you know? Stereotypical Yakuza gangster.”

Well, he’s not wrong. “Just let me talk to him,” Matt insists. “Just let me go talk to him alone for fifteen minutes.” When Foggy wavers, Matt adds, “He’s harmless. He’s stuck in a wheelchair.” Matt forces a smile. “Worst case scenario, we do some pro bono work. It’ll be good press for our little firm.” He pats Foggy on the back and heads back for the door. “And if he cooperates, we’ll be helping take down one of the most powerful Yakuza bosses on the East coast.”

When Foggy doesn’t follow him back into the room, Matt knows he’s been given his time. Of course, Foggy will just be listening and watching on the other side of the mirror, but all he needs is the illusion of privacy to try and get a real conversation out of this guy.

Kimi says nothing as Matt finds his chair again. Matt trails his fingers along the cool, brushed metal of the chair and the table, orienting himself, making a show of it out of habit. The orientation rituals do help, of course, but he doesn’t really need them to know where he is in a room; he just knows that other people expect it of him. And seeming just a little weak in front of clients tends to help them feel a little more at ease.

As he’d hoped, the display takes some of the steel out of Kimi’s spine. He eases into a more natural posture, slumping in his wheelchair, fabric moving against the creaking plastic of the seat.

They sit in silence for a minute.

That minute slowly stretches into several minutes.

Kimi’s heartbeat was already going a little fast, but as Matt lets the awkward silence continue—hoping, perhaps, that it will coerce Kimi into speaking first—the pace increases to a gallop. An odd, tilting feeling hits Matt, like he’s sitting on the slope of a hill. He splays his hands on the table to fight the sensation.

“What do you want?” Kimi finally asks, breaking the spell. His voice is flat, but Matt can hear the tight undertones of desperation.

“It’s okay,” Matt says, listening as Kimi’s heartbeat stutters, then slows. He swallows as the vertigo fades. He’s never had this kind of issue just from hearing someone’s heartbeat. Stick would call him soft, for letting himself get so caught up in another man’s emotions.

_Soldiers don’t need emotions_ , Stick would say, his cane tapping a rhythm that belied the old man’s anger, his annoyance.

God, what a hypocrite.

Matt blinks that thought away. He straightens in his chair and tries to decide how to proceed. “It’s okay,” he repeats. “You know I’m just trying to help you, right?”

Kimi chuckles, low and just a little unsteady. His hands are laced together again, tightly enough to groan against each other. The muscles in his jaw are tight enough to audibly strain. “You can’t help me.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I don’t _want_ your help,” Kimi clarifies, without heat.

“Why not?” Matt tilts his head. “Even if you didn’t trust us to do our best for you, you have to know it’s a bad idea to reject all representation. Just like it’s a bad idea to be pegged as uncooperative by the police.”

“I have been very cooperative,” Kimi says, almost sounding indignant.

Another smile threatens. “By pretending not to speak English?”

The indignation falters. “There’s no point in answering their questions.”

“That’s good,” Matt agrees. “Don’t talk to the police. Talk to your lawyers.” He smiles. “You’ve got the first half down, now let’s work on the second.”

Kimi leans forward, dropping his elbows to the table. It’s an earnest pose that puts his face low, reflects his voice off of the table as he avoids Matt’s face. “Listen. I hope you understand. I am very grateful for what you have done for me. I wasn’t… expecting any help from you, on those docks. I thought I was going to drown with bricks chained to my feet.” An involuntary shiver runs lightly through his frame. “Hopefully they would take mercy and shoot me first.”

Matt nods, then waits.

After a long moment, Kimi continues. “But you must see. I have no good reason to cooperate. I will be dead soon.” He breathes for a few seconds after he says that, like it’s a thought that he didn’t want to believe, but that he’s finally wrapping his head around. “Yakuza do not forgive. There is no such thing as an ex-Yakuza. Only a dead one. They have given me time to end my life. I have not done so. Soon they will do it for me.”

Matt leans forward as well. He’d look Kimi in the face if he could, try to convey his earnestness, but as it is, all he manages is to get both of their faces on the same level. “Then let us help you. We can protect you, Kimi. If you truly feel you have nothing to lose, you can tell the police—”

“I have plenty to lose,” Kimi interrupts. “I have family. I have friends. I have fingers and eyes and plenty of body parts.” He shakes his head quickly, swallowing hard. “No. No. Disobedience is one thing. They will poison me, or smother me in my sleep. Betraying their trust? No. My death would be slow.”

Matt doesn’t have an immediate answer to that.

After a few moments, he settles on, “You don’t have to die.”

He hears the start of a scoff on Kimi’s lips, quickly smothered by a heavy sigh. “No? Are you going to protect me?”

_Yes_ , Matt thinks. He clasps his hands. “We can arrange protection. We can keep you safe.”

“That will hardly matter,” Kimi mutters.

Matt latches onto that. “Who are you worried about, then?”

“Myself,” Kimi says, and while he’s not lying… there’s something off in his tone. He’s telling _a_ truth, not _the_ truth.

“And who else?”

There’s a calculating silence. Kimi leans back, putting more distance between them. “You and your partner, for one,” he says coolly. Another truth, but he’s still holding back. “You’re already a target, as we both know. Aligning yourself with me simply keeps you within their sights. You shouldn’t be talking to me. You shouldn’t even be in the city.”

“You’re deflecting,” Matt guesses. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, the world tilts once more. He drops his elbows to the table to steady himself and speaks through the nausea. “What is it? Blackmail? Who are you protecting? Why--?” Bile rushes up his throat. He forces it back down. Kimi’s heartbeat is thundering in his ears.

Oddly, Matt’s mind jumps to what he saw on the news last night, and to the conversation he had with Foggy. All of the mutants in the world, acting like normal people until they suddenly aren’t.

All at once, Matt understands. Of course. It’s obvious.

“You…” he tries. The air’s been knocked from his lungs. He can’t get the words out.

Foggy, watching from outside, has seen Matt’s distress and rushes in to steady him. “ _Matt?_ ” he says, alarmed. His hands are a pair of anchors on Matt’s shoulders. They feel like the only thing holding him in his chair.

“You’re a mutant,” Matt forces out. “Superhuman.” Matt’s not sure _how_ Kimi’s doing it, but this awful dizziness that’s been plaguing him has onlyhappened in this man’s presence. And it only happens when Kimi’s frightened, when he’s being threatened. “You’re doing this to me.”

Kimi stops breathing, and Matt knows he’s guessed correctly. “I’m sorry,” Kimi grits out on the exhale. “I’m _so_ _sorry_.” He’s beside himself. His heartbeat is going so fast, _so_ fast; Matt’s never heard a heart go so fast. “I’m not trying to do this. I can’t help it. I have to _try_ to make it work on most people. I don’t know why I keep hurting you…” The words are tumbling out of his mouth, then trail off uncertainly.

“Well _stop doing it_ ,” Foggy snarls. His hands leave Matt’s shoulders, and judging from the rattle of handcuff chains and the squeal of the wheelchair’s wheels, they’ve retangled themselves in the front of Kimi’s shirt. “Leave him alone.”

“Foggy…” Matt flaps an ineffective hand in their direction. “Stop it.” He pulls in a few slow breaths, centering himself, letting himself accept the fact that the world around him feels like the inside of a tumble dryer, and he might go spinning off into the walls at any moment. “It’s okay, Kimi,” he murmurs. “When you calm down, I’ll feel better. Isn’t that how this works?”

Kimi’s voice is low and mournful as he says, “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“No.” The plan is forming in Matt’s mind as he speaks. This man will die without his help. And Matt will lose the one weapon he has in his fight to bring down the Yakuza in Hell’s Kitchen—information is what he really needs. Matt’s pushing his luck now, and he knows it. When Matt walked in, this guy liked him, maybe even trusted him just a little—certainly more than he’s trusted anybody else.

But now, Matt’s antagonizing him, picking at his weaknesses, uncovering his secrets. The nausea is fading. “I want to help you.” He hears Kimi’s breathing pause, ready to refuse again, and Matt adds, “You’re protecting someone. I know. I can help you with that. Really, you have to believe me, I can.”

Kimi’s heartbeat slows. His breathing turns harsher. Matt can hear Foggy open his mouth to say something, but Matt holds up a hand to silence him.

“You can’t do this alone,” Matt says gently, as persuasive as he knows how to be. “Come on. Just tell me what’s going on.”

Abruptly, Kimi drops his face into his hands. There are a dozen minute little ripping noises as his fingers tangle painfully in his hair. “Did you know the mutant gene runs in families?” His voice is shaking. “My cousins. My parents. They’re all normal, but my brother’s like me, and my niece is showing signs…” he chokes out the words. “We’ve tried so hard to keep it quiet, but somehow… somebody here knows.”

“Somebody in the Yakuza?” Matt prompts.

Kimi shakes his head minutely. “I don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t matter. If that information gets out… even if the Japanese government doesn’t do anything to them, their lives will be ruined. Even the normal ones will be suspect. I—“ His voice breaks.

The dizziness has faded. Matt reaches across the table and puts a hand on Kimi’s forearm. It’s warm, corded with muscle, but trembling. He gives it a reassuring squeeze. “It’s going to be okay.”

Kimi pulls away from him. With a minor scuffle, he pushes Foggy off of him, before settling back into his chair. He pulls in a steadying breath, and on the next exhale, straightens himself in his chair. It’s a quick change, from borderline tears to stoic calm. Matt wonders how many times that quick recovery has come in handy in Kimi’s line of work.

“What do you want me to do?” That dull note is back in Kimi’s tone, just like back at the docks when his boss gave him the gun. It’s an awful, resigned phrase, and Matt abruptly feels terrible for backing him into a corner like this.

“Help _me_ ,” Matt says. “Help me bring down your bosses. Testify for us. Give us what info you have.” He smiles from behind his glasses. “In return, we’ll help you with your blackmail situation. We won’t let anybody hurt your family, Kimi.”

He’s lying. It doesn’t matter what Kimi does. He’ll help the man even if Kimi fails to be helpful, even if he refuses. He won’t let any harm come to him or his family.

But Kimi doesn’t have to know that. And Matt has a city to protect.

 -oOo-

As soon as they leave the room and the door clicks shut, Foggy whistles, long and low and just a bit shell-shocked. “Dude.”

“Yeah,” Matt agrees.

“I thought we were just going to represent the guy. As, like, a favor to him or something.” He sounds vaguely horrified. “When did I agree to help you bring down the Japanese mafia?”

Matt grins. “Want to help me bring down the Japanese mafia?”

There’s a long silence. “Also: _mutants?_ ”

Matt scratches his head, a little blown away himself. “I guess so.”

Foggy straightens his jacket, adjusts his tie, then reaches over to fix Matt’s collar. “Are you a mutant?”

“No idea.” Matt rubs at his eyes. “I don’t think so, though. My thing is, like…” he trails off as they pass an officer on their way out, the continues once the other man is out of earshot. “I don’t think it’s genetic, anyway.”

Foggy hums thoughtfully, but doesn’t seem bothered. Ever since the initial freak-out about Daredevil, he’s taken everything Matt says with a certain air of detached curiosity. Perhaps he’s decided that getting too worked up is bad for his health. “Also, way to thank a guy for saving your life, or whatever,” Foggy mutters, holding the door open so Matt can pass through. “You’re feeding him to the lions.”

“Not gonna happen,” Matt says instantly. The ferocity of the statement surprises him. “I won’t let it.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deepest apologies for the *lifetime* it's been since I updated this little story. Between work and school and life, my side writing projects have unfortunately fallen through the cracks for a while.  
> For those who read and commented before, thank you so much! It really means a lot, and I hope you enjoy the update (and the updates to come).  
> 

Matt is suited up, one leg outside his apartment window and onto the fire escape, when his phone buzzes on the kitchen counter behind him. 

_“Foggy,_ ” it announces. _“Foggy. Foggy. Foggy.”_

Matt rolls back inside and scoops up the phone, tapping the screen to answer. “Right on cue, mother goose.” 

“Dammit. I knew it.” 

“Knew what?” Matt asks.

“Don’t play dumb.” Lately, Foggy’s tone has taken on this upsetting tinge of helplessness whenever he knows Matt might be going out as the Devil. Matt has been combating it by aggressively ignoring it. The results so far have been less than spectacular. “You’re going to go skulking, aren’t you?”

“I’m just going for a little nighttime walk, Foggy.”

“Past the precinct, you mean.”

“Well…” He’s not wrong. As they were leaving the precinct earlier that day, Matt had asked about the security on the cells. Brett’s harried response hadn’t exactly inspired confidence. Matt figures it can’t hurt to go keep an eye on things until Kimi’s released into witness protection in the morning. He doubts the Yakuza would strike in the middle of the day while the precinct is full, but now that night has fallen, he’s been doing nothing but pace his apartment and think about just how easy it would be for _him_ to get inside the precinct at night, if he wanted to. The Yakuza are surely just as resourceful as Matt is. “I’m just going to go check it out. If the NYPD are doing their jobs, I won’t have to do anything but sit in the cold.”

Foggy falls silent for a simmering moment, then sighs and says, “I thought you were gonna lie low for a bit. Stay at my place. Stay out of the mask until you’re sure what you’re dealing with.”

That had been the plan. But Matt has this sense of foreboding that he just can’t seem to shake. He can’t ignore it and sleep on Foggy’s couch. His gut instincts aren’t always right, but they’re right enough to warrant a follow-up. “Foggy…” Matt pulls the phone a little way from his ear, as if that might somehow distance himself from Foggy’s disapproval. “If I’m going to find out what I’m dealing with, I need Kimi alive. And I need those two Yakuza leaders to stay behind bars, not sprung free by some crooked new cop who’ll look away from the security cameras for the right price.”

Another long silence, and then Foggy’s voice softens. “I know. Do what you gotta do, man. Just be careful.”

Matt hums. “Good night, Foggy.”

He sets the phone down and ducks out of the window, lowering it gently shut behind him. He makes his way up the fire escape and across the roof, ducking beneath his neighbor’s laundry line where it stretches between two air conditioning units. A soft rain has started to fall, pattering lightly against the semi-hard material of his mask. A sodden set of sheets moves heavily in the wind, sounding like nothing so much as the wing of a great, flapping bird.

Matt wonders if the suit would lose its intimidation factor if he walked around in it with an umbrella. Or maybe his rain coat. Even demonic vigilantes need to keep dry, after all. 

The way to the precinct never seems to take long when he’s suited up. The flying leaps from rooftop to rooftop are too exhilarating, the rising sounds and smells from the windows of the buildings he passes drawing his attention in brief little snapshots—a savory whiff of curry and sautéed chicken from one apartment followed by some kind of onion beef stew from another, the overwhelming acrid reek of cat piss in yet another, the sweaty stench of unwashed teenage boy, the similar-yet-entirely-different scent of sex and sweat in the next —each impression whipping by like the jumpy, clumsy paper flip-animations that he used to draw as a kid, back when he could draw. 

He reaches the precinct just as the rain begins to fall in earnest. His feet splash in the inches-deep runoff that gathers in the uneven parking lot pavement. 

Nothing seems out of place. The back door that leads from the parking lot into the precinct seems clear. He doubts anybody would try to come in through the front door. They keep an officer posted at the front desk at all hours. 

No suspicious noises from inside, although he would have difficulty discerning them even if there were. The rain—usually only a minor bother, white noise setting a blurry background fuzz on the normally crisp sounds of the city—is currently falling too heavily for him to hear inside the building. Not without actually going inside, anyway. 

He crouches down between two parked police cars. Rain hits the hollow metal structures, reverberating like artillery. 

He wonders if it would be prudent to get closer, to try to hear the inside, just to hear for himself that Nishi and Kimi are both still there, both still alive. It’s unlikely that anything has changed, but what if? Brett seemed pretty concerned that something might happen. The police force in this city hasn’t exactly had a stellar record of protecting its suspects.

Matt waits a while, to see if the rain might lessen a bit, so that maybe he can catch a glimpse of what’s going on beyond the walls.

Twenty minutes pass, then an hour. The rain only falls harder. 

He’s just considering going home for the night, when something down the street catches his attention. Like a shadowy figure emerging from fog, the hard sounds of footsteps emerge from the rain, less than fifty feet away.

Matt moves silently from his low crouch to press himself flat against the pavement. The rich, chemical smell of fresh paint and asphalt and car oil fill his nose, obliterating all else.

The footsteps move slowly, and that in itself is suspicious. Normal people rush to get where they’re going in this kind of rain. Nobody strolls in a storm. 

Matt focuses in on the sound, straining past the rain’s tumult. Three pairs of shoes. Soft soles, not the hard, flat slap of dress shoes or police boots, but a soft, spongy springiness that indicates running shoes. Not police, then, or anybody who might come to the station this late at night, in this kind of weather. They approach, close enough that, were it daylight, they’d likely have seen him, but for now the shadows and rain hide him. Just to be sure, he slides slowly to the side until he’s half underneath the police car’s chassis.

They make for the back door. None of the three men—definitely men, now that Matt can hear their breathing—speak. One’s jacket brushes up against the body of the car as he walks past. Something dense and metal in the man’s jacket bumps the side of the car with a dulled _clank_. Gun.

They move together in a single file line, like a military unit. The first one reaches the door, and lifts a key ring from his pocket, curling his fingers around them so that they only jangle just a little bit, before placing one into the lock.

Matt only has a second to wonder where they got the key—whether they stole it, or whether one of the new police recruits had already gone crooked—before the door is open and two of them are slipping inside on nearly-silent feet.

The third man stays outside, just underneath the door’s overhang. He rummages in his pocket, leather-gloved hand rubbing high-pitched against silk lining, before the hard metal clatter of his gun bumps against his zipper as he draws it and then lets it hang in a loose grip by his side. 

Matt eases himself out from under the car on his fingertips and toes, and then makes his way across the parking lot, moving from car to car in a silent rush, careful to stay as far away from the silent sentinels of the streetlamps that he knows will reveal him if he gets too close. He reaches the side of the building. It’s an old, brick structure, one of the few that survived The Incident intact. The molding between the bricks is starting to crumble, and Matt hooks onto the thin little spaces with his fingertips and clambers up the flat side of the building. 

Once at the roof, he makes his way back over to the spot right above where the man is standing, and lowers himself down onto the cement molding of the door’s overhang. 

The cement and metal supports groan beneath his weight. The man below shuffles, and lets out a quiet, “What—?”

Matt hooks a hand around the overhang’s metal support beam, and swings down from his perch, using the momentum to drive his feet hard into the lookout’s chest. 

The man’s breath whooshes out, he stumbles backward and falls flat, gun clattering out of his grip and to the side. Before he can draw in his next breath, Matt drives his elbow into the man’s temple and he falls still.

After taking a split second to ensure the man is still breathing, Matt rummages the keys from the man’s jacket. It takes several attempts—wasted seconds that he curses—to jam several different keys into the door’s lock before the right one finally catches and turns.

He pulls the door open on whispering hinges and steps into the quiet room. As the door swings shut behind him, the roaring rain outside recedes to a far more manageable murmur. 

The room is small, steeped in the mildering smell of old cardboard and paper, sharp aroma of cleaning supplies, and dust. Lots of dust. Store room. 

Matt pauses to listen, and at first, hears nothing out of the ordinary. The electric lights are buzzing, the pipes in the walls are gurgling, there’s a quiet rattle in the heating system, all normal sounds. The clerk at the front of the building studiously ignores a ringing desk phone. 

And then, closer, the sounds of a struggle—a closed fist against flesh, a muffled shout, as if smothered against a palm—and Matt’s moving, through the next door and into a hallway, and then shouldering past a closed door on the right hand side, toward the room that holds the largest holding cell. 

Inside, one of the intruders stands just inside the open cell door, a syringe in one gloved hand, the other on top of a still, silent body. 

Matt’s heart catches in his throat, and then, stutteringly kicks back into a confused rhythm as his senses catch up, and he realizes that the body in the bed is not Kimi.

The hospital smell is there, sure, and the aroma of hospital food, but as the body settles, lifeless, against the bedding, the loose leg hinges, quietly, with the deep metal resonance of a hip replacement. 

The intruder lifts his hand slowly from Mr. Nishi’s slack mouth and turns to face Matt. 

_I don’t understand,_ Matt almost says, stupidly, but the intruder is already reaching into his pocket, and Matt only has time to rush forward and knock the gun from the man’s grip, absorbing a clumsy punch with his forearm and twisting to catch the arm and pull, throwing the man off-balance and to the floor, skull making an impressive hollow sound as it connects with the cement.

Behind him, through several walls, comes a loud _thunk_ of something heavy hitting the floor. 

Matt turns on his heel out of the room and across to the other side of the hallway where the rest of the holding cells lie. The door is shut, and Matt reaches out for the door handle just as the ground begins to tilt beneath his feet. 

_Kimi_ , he thinks warily, swinging the door open and clutching the doorframe for support. 

Sharp, scuffling sounds emanate from the back corner of the leftmost cell, where his warping senses still manage to tell him that two people are struggling wordlessly, one on the ground, the other grabbing at him and—judging by the way he keeps trying to catch and pin the other man’s hands—trying to drag him out of the cell. The man on the ground is kicking at the intruder with only one leg, the other heavy and useless in its fiberglass cast.

Matt tries to step toward them, but that precarious vertigo increases and nearly knocks him off his feet. He turns his attention briefly to the other cell, just to make sure the other Yakuza, the smoker, isn’t going to be a threat, only to reflexively withdraw when he finds that odd, vacuous silence and slowly diminishing heat of a dead body.

Living people have a tendency to shift and blur, but the dead man’s body comes through with crystal clear precision flat on its back in bed, still under the sheets, peaceful. No signs of struggle.

On the other side of the room, the intruder shoves Kimi down and then stands, wavering a bit as well, as if struggling to keep his balance, stepping away from him and toward Matt. He approaches slowly, almost casually, shoes scuffing against the concrete, head hung low, stinking of dried sweat and musty clothes and wet dog. 

“You’re the Devil,” the man says. To Matt’s surprise, the accent is local. Native New Yorker. “Right?” the man adds, sounding uncertain, followed by the faint brushing sound as he blinks, trying to see in the unlit, windowless room. The only electricity that Matt can hear is a whine coming from the hallway behind him. To the people in the room, he’s probably nothing more than a menacing silhouette. 

When Matt doesn’t answer, the man grits his jaw—a harsh, high squeak of tooth against tooth—and digs a hand into his jacket pocket.

Matt rushes forward, reaching to grab the gun before its barrel can swing to meet him, only to feel his legs lock, then, strangely, give out entirely. The ground rushes up toward him as he falls flat on his face. His chin hits the cement, hard. The entire inside of his skull rings like a great, deep, cathedral bell.

His senses flicker in and out. He growls and forces his hands underneath his chest and pushes himself up off of the ground, expecting at any moment to feel a gun to his head while he lies stunned on the floor—

Only to have that horrible weakness and disorientation lift as easily as it came.

Quick and clumsy, he pulls his feet up underneath him and rocks into a defensive crouch, ready to catch at the man’s gun hand.

He finds nothing but empty air.

It takes him a wild moment to realize that the intruder is breathing peacefully at his feet, arms and legs splayed. The salty, rich smell of blood fills Matt’s nose as he leans forward and brushes a light finger along the intruder’s head, at the split in the skin where the forehead hit the floor.

He realizes, in that same moment, that the gun has found its way into a different pair of hands.

Kimi sits beside the open cell door, one leg pulled up close to his chest. 

Cursing himself for being so sloppy, Matt stands and considers his odds. Kimi’s just a couple of paces away. Matt could cross that space in a heartbeat, but that would still be plenty of time to squeeze off a round or two at point-blank range.

“Don’t come any closer.” Kimi’s voice shakes, but the gun is oddly silent, unrattled. Held in steady hands. 

Just as Matt is considering simply leaving the room and letting the far-less-intimidating police come in and talk the man down, Kimi’s shoulders slump, and he abruptly tosses the gun aside. It clatters across the floor. “If you’re going to kill me or whatever, just do it.” His voice cracks. “Please”

Slowly, Matt steps closer and bends down to pick up the gun, acutely aware of the other man’s proximity, the heat radiating off of him, the way he stops breathing when Matt leans within reach, as if expecting the slightest muscle twitch will set the Devil off. 

Just as slowly, he disassembles the gun and tosses the pieces aside. “Who were those people?” he asks.

Kimi swallows, but doesn’t answer. 

Oh, God. Matt has had enough of this man’s stubborn silences. His careful plans are crumbling and he doesn’t even know where to throw his punches. “ _Answer_ me.” The words burst from his chest in a snarl as he steps forward.

Kimi gives something resembling a full-body flinch, but still says nothing.

With a growl, Matt turns his back on him, swallowing his rage. Threatening the man he’s here to protect won’t be helpful, he reminds himself. No matter how much the man frustrated him.

Back still to Kimi, Matt crouches back down and begins to pat through the unconscious man’s pockets. His light touch finds a set of car keys in the trouser pocket, a wallet with some money and several thick paper business cards, but none made from the stiff plastic that might indicate a driver’s license or credit card.

“You’re… not here to kill me,” Kimi says, quietly. He remains very, very still as Matt straightens, as if moving might draw Matt’s violence to him, like a savage dog.

Matt doesn’t trust himself to turn around. He knows if he does, he’ll probably do something stupid, like shout at him. Or, even worse, give the vague apology that he suddenly realizes is hovering right within reach, ready to spill out.

Kimi’s heartbeat is slowing back to normal levels. 

Past them, actually. Slower than it ought to be. 

“Are you alright?” Matt asks, realizing—perhaps belatedly—that Kimi’s responses aren’t simple shock. There’s something off about him, about his breathing.

Kimi shuffles a bit in response, shoulders raising in a clumsy shrug. “That man, um…” he clears his throat, and it sounds almost like a laugh. “Stuck me with something. Some kind of needle.” 

_Dammit_. Matt focuses for a moment, scanning the room—body on the floor, Kimi by the cell door, the hospital wheelchair upturned on the floor, and—there, right there, by the bed. A hard, round cylinder. 

Matt steps over Kimi’s outstretched leg, into the cell, and stoops down to pick the innocuous little syringe up from the floor. 

“Why didn’t you say something?” If this is the same stuff they injected into the two Yakuza—

Then Kimi would already be dead, he realizes. The old man died immediately after he was injected. Instantaneous.

Matt lifts the needle to his nose and inhales. Blood, saline, plastic, and—he recognizes that smell. Claire had kept a vial of the mixture amongst the many in her kit. She’d laughed when he opened each vial and asked her the names, the uses, holding them under his nose and memorizing each subtle scent. 

“Just a sedative,” he says, with some relief.“You’ll be fine.”

“Oh.” Kimi’s head falls back against the bars behind him with a soft thunk. 

Matt moves to stand, one hand on the cell door, Kimi at his feet. He really should leave, but he feels a responsibility to stay as long as Kimi is awake. Shouldn’t be much longer.

Groggily, Kimi’s head tilts up in his direction. “You broke my leg, you know.”

Something about how he says it, without any real accusation, almost makes Matt smile. “I’m sorry about that.” There, the apology he’d been trying to repress. Just saying it makes him feel a little lighter.

“Sure you are.” Kimi’s words are slurring in earnest now, but the sarcasm cuts through nonetheless.

“I’ll make it up to you,” Matt says. The room is quiet, so quiet. No buzz of lights, nothing but the his breaths and heartbeat, an up-tempo beat that contrasts against the other man’s quiet descent into unconsciousness until, with a final sigh, Kimi sinks into sleep.

Matt turns, intending to leave like he said—he needs to raise the alarm, bring in the police and ambulances and coroners, go home and wait to be called in to play the part of Kimi’s indignant and concerned lawyer—but instead finds himself lingering, reluctant to leave the room. 

Behind him, Kimi breathes softly and evenly, as relaxed as Matt’s ever heard him in their short acquaintance. But there’s something… something that Matt finds himself automatically scanning the room for even though he can’t quite put his finger on it, noting the slow rise and fall of Kimi’s shoulders, the near-silent pull of the lean muscles in his chest and stomach, the faint drag of tension where his expression still hasn’t smoothed, even with sleep.

Matt wants nothing more, he realizes, than to just go sit down next to Kimi and wait, consequences be damned. Just so he can guard him while he sleeps. Just so he can be there when he wakes up. 

“Oh. Shit.” The answer is suddenly and glaringly apparent. Matt gives himself a shake and forces himself to turn, to leave the room, pulling the fire alarm on the wall on his way out.

“I’m an idiot,” he says, as he makes his way back out, into the rain. 

#

Hours later, he finds himself standing in that same hallways, under entirely different circumstances.

“This is the room where it happened,” Brett is saying, leading them through the hectic building toward the proper room, opening the door and gesturing at the left-hand cell and then, for Matt’s sake, saying, “Your client was in the left-most cell.”

The entire precinct is in an uproar—as they should be; two suspects awaiting trial dead, another drugged and nearly kidnapped. Matt hasn’t yet heard the word “Devil,” and he imagines that the specifics of the attacks are being kept under wraps, to minimize the chaos and speculation, but once that gets out, God knows what kind of energy will be buzzing in the building.

Inside the room, a half-dozen people—forensic techs, Matt assumes—walk around, squeaking in their rubber gloves and plastic shoe and hair covers. Matt hopes to God that he didn’t leave behind any damning evidence. He’d obsessively checked himself over for nicks or scrapes when he got home earlier, stripping down and trying to find any injuries that adrenaline might have masked. 

“Were all of the cells properly locked?” Matt asks. He’s traded the Devil armor for his gray wool suit. He’d realized, after he got back to his apartment and spent far too long debating calling Foggy—after all, was it better to call Foggy and warn him that they were about to be called into the station at three in the morning, or to shield him as much as possible from the Devil?—that Kimi’s little puppet-string-cutting trick had left Matt with a painful, swollen spot on the bottom of his chin, where his face had hit the cement. That had decided it, eventually. He’d needed to meet up with Foggy beforehand to make sure that it wasn’t too obvious, that nobody could possibly draw connections between his bruise and the Devil in the CC footage. 

Foggy had been surprisingly pragmatic about the whole thing. Matt wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or not. There had been no shouting, but there hadn’t been any smiles or jokes that morning either. He’d grabbed Matt’s face, tilted into the light, then shrugged and said, “Just don’t shave. Nobody’ll notice under the stubble.”

“Yeah, we have footage of them being locked,” Brett says. 

“And you have footage of the attack?” Foggy asks. When Brett nods, he adds, “Can we see it?”

“We’ll be releasing it to you within the hour, they tell me,” Brett says. He drops his voice. “It’s the damnedest thing.”

“Did you watch it?” Foggy asks, dropping his voice as well and taking obvious—or perhaps, obvious only to Matt—care to keep the concern out of his voice.

“Yeah.” Brett shakes his head fervently, creating a little whirlwind of air currents around him. “Damnedest thing, like I said. These guys came in, killed two extremely high-profile Yakuza prisoners, and tried to make off with a third.”

Matt cuts in. “Tried to make off with him?” 

Brett leads them back out into the hallway. “Well, that’s what it looks like, anyway. The other two were poisoned in their sleep. Your client, Mister Hatakenaka—damn, that’s a mouthful—was injected, but with nothing more than a sedative. And before it even kicked in completely, the suspect grabbed your client and tried to dump him in the wheelchair. Probably because he realized their cover’d been blown. We don’t know where they were trying to take him.” Brett’s palm rasps like sandpaper as he runs it across his shaved head. “We don’t even know who they’re working for. Why kill the bosses and try to kidnap somebody from the bottom rank? What could he possibly have that they want?”

“So the attackers are in custody,” Matt concludes. What he wouldn’t give to get a chance to talk to them in person, ferret the truth out. 

“Yeah, and they aren’t talking.” He holds up a hand to ward off Matt’s next question. “Don’t worry, we’ve got them under twenty-four hour watch. This isn’t going to happen again.”

Foggy huffs and lets his elbow knock Matt’s just the tiniest bit. Matt raises an eyebrow in response. It’s the closest they get to trading looks. The number of times they’ve had to deal with police failing to protect the people in their own jail cells and then promising it won’t happen again…

“Well,” Foggy says finally. “We’d like to speak to our client as soon as possible. He’s uninjured, I understand.”

“No worse for wear,” Brett agrees. “Though he’s pretty damn jumpy at the moment. Understandably.” His phone buzzes, and he checks the screen. “Oh, but first, let’s go look at the CC footage really quickly. Just got the green light to release it to you.”

They follow Brett to a little side conference office with a desk, a few chairs, and a small computer. Matt lets Foggy take the screen—the video clips won’t have sound anyway—choosing a seat off to the side, settling his cane between his knees, worrying at the worn leather grip with his fingers.

After the clip starts, Brett clears his throat and says, fingernail tapping the screen, “Okay. We’ve got three guys coming up to the back door. Two going in.” He continues describing as they split up in the hall to move to the two different holding cell rooms. One injecting the old man, Mister Nishi, with a syringe. 

“Oh, and yep, there’s the Devil.” Foggy and Matt both feign surprise at hearing that Hell’s Kitchen’s favorite vigilante was involved in stopping the attack. “Just came in and threw Perp One on the ground. Now we’re switching back to the other camera. Perp Two’s in the other room, unlocking the other Yakuza’s cell, just injected him. Now he’s heading over to Mister Hatakenaka’s cell.” He falters a bit as he describes Kimi being injected, waking up, struggling as the taller man bodily forces him into the wheelchair, and then throwing himself out of the chair. The two of them struggling on the floor.

“Aaand here comes the Devil again. Oh, not sure what happened there. They both went down. Perp Two’s out cold. Devil’s up again. They’re talking. They’re talking. The Devil’s making some threatening gestures.” Matt feels Foggy glance at him. “He’s just standing there, now.” Another furtive look Matt’s way. “Still standing there.”

When the clip finishes, Brett sighs and says, “Okay. That’s the whole story as far as we know it.” He stands. “You coming? The EMTs should definitely be done checking him out by now.”

Matt moves to follow, but Foggy puts a hand on his shoulder to keep him in his seat. “We’ll be right there. Just need to talk real quick.” 

Matt frowns, but sits back in his chair and waits.

As soon as the door shuts behind Brett, Foggy throws up his hands and says, tone exasperated, verging on disgusted. “Oh my _God_ , Matt.”

“What?”

“God, I should’ve known better,” Foggy continues, half to himself. “This isn’t a justice crusade. It isn’t one of your fucking bleeding heart cycles.” The words cut out, razor sharp. “What the hell, Matt.”

Matt opens his mouth, but finds that he has nothing to say to that. 

Foggy takes this as confirmation and claps both hands to his eyes, rubbing them and groaning despairingly. “Matt. How could you? I mean, I know you’ve got a kink for the morally inert, but _that_ guy?”

“I’m not—” Matt finally musters, but then can’t quite figure out how to finish. Honestly, trying to hide it from Foggy would never have been a feasible plan. “What makes you say that?”

Foggy scoffs. “Dude, I know you. You’re a puppy dog when you get all caught up on someone. _That_ behavior, right there,” his finger taps heavily against the computer screen’s glass, presumably pointing at the clip. “You’re _hovering_. Like a momma duck.”

“I think you’re mixing your metaphors.”Matt’s suddenly glad that, no matter how tempting it had been, he didn’t say anything more to Kimi—or, God forbid, go sit beside him like he’d so badly wanted. That would have been very difficult for anybody watching the CC footage to puzzle out. 

He’s still trying to puzzle his own feelings out—and he’ll be the first to attest that he’s never been good at that. This distracting mixture of fascination and protectiveness that has him, even now, automatically wanting to reach out with his senses and pinpoint Kimi amongst the rest of the people in the building. Maybe that _could_ all be pinpointed to some kind of crush, some kind of attraction.

Matt can’t remember what it feels like to fall for someone within a ‘normal’ context. What he’d had with Claire had been… something. But not normal. And before that… he can’t remember.

He can feel Foggy’s eyes on him. “That’s not—” Matt tries, only to cut himself off when the protest rings false in his own ears. “I don’t know. I just…”

Abruptly, Foggy deflates. “Oh, Geez,” he says, flapping a helpless hand in Matt’s direction. “Don’t look so pathetic. God. With your stupid sad face.”

Matt doesn’t realize how deeply his own frown has pulled until it pulls back up into a laugh. 

“But, _Jesus_.” Foggy says again. “I mean, I know we’ve already established that you’ve got a thing for disreputable people, but I was hoping we could keep it out of the purview of, you know, _actual_ criminals _._ ”

Matt brings up a hand to rub at his eyes.

“Quit that.” Foggy’s hand reaches out to catch at Matt’s wrist. “You’re making your eyes red. And you already look like you haven’t slept. Which you haven’t.”

“Oh.” Matt drops his hand. He’s tired. That’s all. “I just—I dunno.” Yeah, he’s attractive, but Matt doesn’t have time for anything like that. He doesn’t have the energy to try and add _another_ important person to his life, only to keep secrets from them. “I just feel, you know, connected to him. Like I have to protect him. That’s all.”

Foggy sucks in a quick breath, obviously meaning to say something cutting, but seems to change his mind halfway through and instead releases it slowly through his nose. “Yeah. Okay. I get it.”

“And I wasn’t hovering.”

“You absolutely were.”

Matt’s face feels hot. He tilts his head down to hide it.

“It’s a damn good thing that suit makes you look so intimidating, or everybody else would see it too.” Foggy’s gaze is still heavy on him until he heaves yet another sigh. “Just promise me, whatever you do, you don’t do anything stupid.” He pauses. “Well, _too_ stupid, anyway. We already know the former’s impossible.”

“Not too stupid,” Matt agrees. It’s a struggle to make himself lift his face from the floor, but he forces himself back up to Foggy’s level. “We should go. You’re going to want to catch the commissioner before he leaves.”

Foggy grins and rubs his hands together. “Damn right I am.”

Matt almost feels sorry for the new commissioner. The man won’t see Foggy coming, and there’s no way they’re leaving without full terms of release as well as a barrel of favors owed. The two of them have, unsettlingly, become incredibly good at dealing with the precinct’s inability to protect their clients.

Once outside the little meeting room, they find Brett standing and chatting with a man that Matt has only met a couple of times since he was hired—after the corruption scandal.

Beside him, Foggy gets an extra little bounce in his step as he stretches out a hand to shake, “Commissioner Sanderson! Just the man I wanted to see.”

“Ah,” Sanderson says, actually backpedaling a little bit, feet giving an extra couple of scuffs against the linoleum floor. He’s a man of average build, around Foggy’s height, but he always carries a sort of harried, nervous energy that Matt ascribes to the pressure of his new position. “Mister Nelson. Mister Murdock. You two sure got here quickly.”

“We’re very dedicated to our clients, Commissioner,” Foggy agrees with overbearing cheer. Matt almost feels bad for Sanderson. Nobody fares well when Foggy gets into that kind of mood. “Did you get my message. We really do need to meet as soon as possible. Our client’s current situation is pretty pressing, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”

“Do you want to go meet with your client first?” Brett asks.

The commissioner latches onto that, already turning, as if ready to make his escape, “Oh, well, it sounds like you need to go handle that. I really should be—”

Foggy cuts him off before he can weasel away, stretching an indicating arm in Matt’s direction. “Lucky for everyone, Mister Murdock and I are two people who can be in two places at the same time. Matt can go talk with Mister Hatakenaka while you and I have a chat.”

“Ah, right.” Defeated, Sanderson gives a slow nod. He waves a weary hand in Brett’s direction. “I’ll take them from here.”

Sanderson, Foggy, and Matt fall into step again. Brett peels off in the other direction, obviously glad to finally get a chance to go home. 

“Your client’s in here,” Sanderson says, slowing beside a door guarded by a policeman on each side. 

Matt puts his hand on the door, but Foggy reaches for Matt’s shoulder and says, low enough for only Matt to hear, “Do you need a chaperone? Should I be expecting you to announce that you’re going to go steal the Japanese crown jewels for him, too, or are we all set with just bringing down the Yakuza?”

Matt pretends to consider that. “Does Japan have crown jewels?”

“Or, you know, whatever the equivalent—That’s not the point.” Foggy squeezes Matt’s shoulder. “Don’t go making promises we can’t keep.”

Matt raises both hands in surrender. “Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

“Good.” Foggy slaps him on the back and turns away.

Matt feels an odd sense of trepidation as Sanderson, sour and stoop-shouldered, leads Foggy away. 

He doesn’t want to meet Kimi alone, he realizes. He does want Foggy there, as a buffer. 

But he sure as hell isn’t going to admit that now.

The police officer on his right leans over to unlock the door, offering an awkward, guiding arm that Matt wants to ignore, but takes for appearance’s sake.

They step inside. The room—which Matt belatedly recognizes as the smaller interrogation room, narrow and concrete and intimate, furnished only with a short table and a couple of straight-backed metal chairs—smells strongly of antiseptic, medical-grade rubber, and, incongruously, bread and dairy.

The food—a couple of bagels and a small disposable tub of Philadelphia cream cheese, Matt recognizes, as he lets the metal of his cane tap against the door frame to get a good, sharp image of the room—sits untouched on a plate in the center of the table.

Hand light on the crook of the officer’s arm, Matt lets himself be lead over to the nearest chair. As he moves, he gathers info, trying to gauge where Kimi’s head is at. The sound of the other man’s heartbeat is immediately—and unexpectedly—soothing. Some small part of Matt’s tension eases just by being in the same room as Kimi.

But in spite of that, Kimi sounds... haggard. His heart is in that fragile, quick rhythm that people tend to get when they’re dealing with chronic stress. Each breath is light, shallow, the way that people do when they’re on edge and can’t do anything about it. It’s a natural reflex that most people have when stressed, instinctively wanting to make less noise, draw less attention to themselves. 

Kimi’s head tilts up when Matt enters, and those hectic rhythms ease, just the tiniest fraction. 

A sign of trust. Blatant as anything. Matt squares his shoulders and hopes he can live up to it.

“There’s a chair right here. Table’s on your left,” the officer says, lifting Matt’s hand from his elbow and placing it on the chair’s back. It’s such a natural, practiced motion that Matt can only assume the woman probably has a blind friend or family member in her life. 

“Thanks.” Matt flashes a smile up at her as he lowers himself into the seat. “We’ll let you know when we’re all finished. And—” he reaches vaguely for the officer’s hand. She lets him catch her wrist. “This conversation needs to be private. No recordings please.”

“Sure,” the officer says, and makes her way out, pausing to nod in Kimi’s direction before shutting the door behind her.

“Hey, Kimi,” Matt says, as soon as the door clicks shut.

“Hi, Matt.” It’s difficult to tell if those words ride a sigh of relief or a sigh of exhaustion, but either way his shoulders droop in his wheelchair.

Matt doesn’t speak again until a moment later, when the faint electrical hum from the camera in the corner shuts off as the officer disables it. “I hear you’ve had a rough night,” he says.

Kimi gives a sharp, congested laugh. “You could say that.” 

“Are you alright?” Matt asks.

Kimi shifts and crosses his arms. “I’m fine.”

The lie is so blatant, Matt doesn’t even have to listen to his heartbeat to tell. “You seem kind of shaken,” he observes, keeping his voice light, leaving a hint of a question in his tone.

Kimi swallows and turns his head away. “Can I leave soon?”

“You want to leave now?” He’d seemed pretty resigned to his fate the day before.

“I’d rather not spend another second in that cell.”

Fair enough. “Well, as it so happens, my partner, Mister Nelson is working on that as we speak. We should have the terms of your release settled soon.”

Kimi nods slowly. “Good.”

An uneasy silence falls between them. Matt wants to say something to ease it, something to offset the tension, but nothing comes to mind. 

“Your hand looks better,” Kimi observes quietly. “I thought it was broken.”

Matt resists the urge to flex it. It _isn’t_ really better. It still aches, but he’s been using it anyway. He fights even with broken fingers and toes sometimes, so this isn’t so bad. It should stop bothering him once he gets a chance to really sit down and meditate on it for a bit. “It wasn’t broken, no. Just dislocated. It isn’t bothering me, and the splint makes it hard to hold my cane.” A lie he’d practiced before coming. Funny that Kimi is the only one to notice the detail.

“Oh.” Another tenuous silence. “What happened to your chin?”

The other man is trying to get the attention off of him and onto something else. Matt lets him, at least for now. He touches the tender spot on his jaw with light fingers. The bruise must be developing. He forces a laugh and feigns embarrassment. “Oh, it’s nothing. Sometimes I bump into things. Miscalculated and hit my chin while taking out the trash this morning.”

“You live alone?”

“Yeah, I do.” Matt feels himself starting to bristle at the stereotypical line of questioning. First it’s _Do you live alone?_ and then it’s _You should probably get a dog. And hire someone to take out your trash_. _And really would a live-in aide be such a bad idea?_

Kimi nods slowly. “It seems like you do well for yourself.” He sounds a little impressed.

Some pathetic little spot in Matt’s chest warms. The defensiveness leeches out and leaves him sheepish. “I do okay.”

“More than okay,” Kimi judges. “The police certainly talk like you do, anyway.”

“They talk about me in front of you?” How unprofessional. 

Kimi shrugs. “They did when they thought I didn’t speak English. They talk about you and your partner like you’re coming to set the precinct on fire.”

Matt winces, but can’t suppress the grin that threatens to spread. “I’d prefer to think the police and I are working toward the same goals. Justice. Truth. All that.”

Kimi huffs through his nose. “Doesn’t sound like they see it the same way.”

“No, I’m not sure if they do,” Matt says, and then waits. All of this talking, Matt knows, is just chattering, nervous energy. Too apprehensive to sit in silence.

As if to confirm Matt’s suspicion, Kimi only lets the quiet drag for a few seconds before his fingers begin to flex anxiously against each other again.

“Kimi…” Matt pauses to gather his thoughts. “I know this is really stressful, but do you have _any_ idea who those people were? The ones that attacked you last night?”

As Matt speaks, Kimi’s shoulders slowly inch back up toward his ears. “No, I don’t.”

Truth. Surprisingly. “Not even a guess?”

“I…” Kimi swallows, and when he speaks again, he’s looking down, voice directed at his knees. “I don’t understand what’s going on.” His voice dulls. “I didn’t think it could get worse, but now—I don’t know. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they wanted with me. At least—” he gives an odd, strained laugh. “At least when I had the Yakuza after me, I knew what to expect. But these people aren’t Yakuza.” The words tumble out a little faster. “And they weren’t trying to kill me. They were trying to take me away. Somewhere. And I don’t know why, or where they were going to take me, or what they were going to…” He gesticulates sharply with one hand, the other coming dropping to grip anxiously at the material of his pants. “What were they going to _do_ to me? I don’t--” He cuts himself off.

“You don’t what?”

Kimi swallows and straightens his shoulders. Quite suddenly, the fragile cracks in his demeanor smooth over, as if they were never there. Instead, an odd wariness remains.

A second later, a knock comes at the door. Kimi must’ve seen the officer approaching through the window. Matt hadn’t been paying attention. He has to grind his teeth for a second to keep from noticeably kicking himself.

Meanwhile, the officer steps back into the room. She has her hand on her belt, beside her gun. Matt’s noticed that a lot of police officers do something similar, a sort of unconscious display when dealing with uncertain situations, like a dog showing its teeth. “I just received a call from Commissioner Sanderson.” She directs her voice at Matt. “Your client is free to go.”

Matt smiles at her, aware that Kimi has gone very still beside him. “That’s good to hear. Um,” he says, pauses, then asks, injecting sheepishness into his tone, “You mind if I take another minute to chat with my client?”

“I suppose.” There’s the soft sound of her blinking, as if she’s glancing between Matt and Kimi. “Just give a shout out the door when you’re ready.”

She retreats once more, and the door swings shut. 

Matt forces a smile in Kimi’s direction. “Looks like you’re home free, Mister Hatakenaka. Now all that remains is the matter of where you’ll be staying. Of course, I’m sure Foggy has secured some form of police or witness protection, but we need to decide—“

Kimi cuts him off. “Can’t I just go back to my apartment?”

Matt frowns. “We should try and avoid your known residence. These people seem to be keeping tabs on your whereabouts. We ought to make that as difficult as possible for them.”

“You’re staying at your apartment.”

“I’m not currently being hunted by persons unknown. And, morbid as the circumstances may be, your employers are dead and as such are no longer a threat to me.”

Abruptly, Kimi pulls in a sharp breath, they way that people do when an unexpected thought has just occurred to them, and settles his shoulders back against the creaking vinyl of the wheelchair. “Are you afraid, Matt?”

Matt senses immediately that the question isn’t as simple as it seems. He answers carefully. “No. Why?”

“Yeah, you don’t look scared,” Kimi says. “You don’t look like you’ve hired any bodyguards, either. And no police protection, as far as I can tell. Even though last night you _were_ still in danger, as far as you knew.”

“I like my privacy.” Normally a somewhat acceptable excuse, the current situation turns it to water in Matt’s mouth. “And I can take care of myself.”

“I can tell,” Kimi says, with a sardonic edge. 

“I’m not worried the Yakuza will come after me again.”

Kimi abruptly tilts his head downward, as if he’s been looking Matt in the eye this entire time and suddenly can’t sustain the contact. “You haven’t asked me about the Devil.”

Matt swallows. He must have misheard. “What?”

“The Devil. He was here last night. It’s on the tapes. He protected me.” His head tilts back up, scrutinizing Matt’s face, unblinking. “But that doesn’t seem to have surprised you.”

“What do you—?” Matt says, struggling to keep his face still and certain he’s failing. Matt stumbles over his words as he searches for an acceptable lie. “Of course I’m surprised. I—”

“No, you’re not.” Whatever emotion is on Matt’s face seems to confirm Kimi’s suspicions. He leans forward, suddenly eager. “You knew he’d be around, didn’t you? I’ve heard he was involved in that big thing with that corporate guy you put in prison a while back.”

Fisk. Of course Kimi might draw that link. Matt curses himself for not thinking of it before. “I don’t know for sure. He just shows up sometimes.”

“To protect your clients.”

“How would I know that?” Matt hedges. 

There’s a faint trace of a smile in Kimi’s voice. “You think I’m stupid.”

“Of course not.”

“So is he protecting me, for some reason?” Kimi asks, entirely frank. “Is he protecting you?”

Matt’s heart thunders against his chest. He’s never had anybody get so close to simply guessing his secret. Sure, Foggy knows, and Claire knows, but that was only because he’s actively bled in uniform in front of them. He wonders how much Kimi’s figured out, how much he _will_ figure out, and forces himself to tread carefully, to keep his expression calm and slack. “Kimi…” He trails off. No magical answer presents itself. 

“You can tell me,” Kimi says. He shrugs loosely, palms up on the table. “I’m a dead man anyway. Who am I gonna tell?”

All at once, Matt reaches a decision. He listens for a moment, checking to make sure that the camera in the corner is still dead, that there are no officers standing near the door, ready to enter, and then lowers his voice and leans forward and says, “Fine.” Kimi automatically leans forward, head down, mirroring Matt’s secretive posture, and Matt lowers his voice even further before murmuring, “I do. I think he is protecting me. And my clients. I think he and I have ended up with some of the same enemies, and trying to fight some of the same targets. My little law practice has found itself in the middle of some major organized crime scandals, which seem to be the Devil’s main focus.”

“Like the Yakuza.”

“Exactly.” Matt can feel his own panic receding. This is a reasonable enough explanation, and it ties Matt to the Devil in a plausible way without actually implicating himself as working with the vigilante. “I don’t know the Devil, haven’t spoken to him personally, but I get the feeling that he hangs around to help out when my clients and I are under fire.”

Slowly, Kimi nods. “That makes sense.”

Thank God. “And I think he sees you as integral to exposing some major criminal players in Hells’ kitchen," Matt adds. "And I happen to agree.”

Kimi is still nodding, but the nervous air has yet to fade. “Okay. So what should I do? Take police protection? Where would I live?”

“You should definitely accept police protection.” Matt doubts it’ll help, but it would be suspicious as hell for him to counsel against police protection, considering he’s the man’s lawyer. “And we can find you a hotel to stay at for a while.”

Another nervous shift. “I can’t… really afford a hotel.”

Right. Money problems. “Then come stay at my place.” The words tumble out of Matt’s mouth before he has a chance to really consider them, but he immediately decides not to take them back. “Really. I have the space.”

Kimi hesitates. “Is that a good idea?” There’s something similar to hope trailing on the tail edge of the question.

“Sure.” Matt stands. Now that he’s come to the decision, he isn’t going to give Kimi a chance to second-guess it. “The police have been wanting to set a watch on my apartment. It’ll conserve resources. And if the Devil _is_ looking out for us, it’ll be easier for him to have us under the same roof.”

Kimi draws in a breath, as if to say something, but pauses.

“Okay?” Matt presses. He holds out his hand, letting the backs of his fingers trail along the table until they’re within Kimi’s reach.

Kimi chews his lip for another long moment, then sighs and takes Matt’s hand in a firm, steady grip. “Okay.”


End file.
